Greg Cross: You know, the art of creating digital characters and digital personalities, I mean, that's been finely honed in the movie industry and what makes us fall in love with these avatars and these CGI characters is that they do express emotion in a very human-like way. Soul machines is an artificial intelligence company. We make avatars and we bring them to life using a completely new paradigm in the world of animation. Something we call autonomous animation. So autonomous animation is what we are doing in this conversation.

Transforming Artificial Intelligence to Emotional Intelligence: What does the new evolution of AI mean for the financial services industry? Speakers: Mr. Greg Cross, Chief Business Officer, Soul Machines, presents ground breaking work followed by Q&A from the audience.

New Zealanders are used to the idea of automation and industrial robots in manufacturing and some homes have those disc shaped vacuum cleaners roaming the house of their own volition in order to keep everything spick and span. Many people have exchanged messages with chat bots online in order to get a few questions answered. But a New Zealand company, Soul Machines, has taken the chat bot idea to the next level and developed so called "digital humans." Just over a month ago, the Natwest Bank in the UK started testing an artificial intelligence-powered "digital human" called Cora who will converse with customers from a terminal in bank branches, with the aim of cutting down on waiting times. The bank hopes Cora's artificial intelligence will eventually expand to answering hundreds of different questions, but at the same time insists the avatar is there to complement, not replace humans.