At Finextra’s first NextGen: AI event, Roberto Napolitano, chief marketing officer at Innovate Finance, moderated the panel session: ‘How do we deploy?’ in conversation with speakers Sandra Blaga, strategy and innovation manager of AI delivery at NatWest, and Prashant Jajodia, managing partner and financial services sector lead at IBM.
Kicking off the panel, Jajodia cited three examples in which IBM is utilising AI tools: in deploying AI chatbots for seven of 10 top British banks, using AI in a system called AskHR for servicing employees, and in application modernisation for software development.
Blaga said that all business leaders need to be engaging in AI-focused conversations, and culture change is a big task. She added that in their AI adoption process, NatWest is breaking down governance into sections to ensure compliance is comprehensive, and are investing in upskilling and training employees.
“I think with around 60,000 colleagues across the bank, we really have a potential of changing the AI knowledge for UK workforce,” Blaga stated. She continued that communication transparency and ensuring ethical AI are “an absolute must-have” that must be considered in every use case.
When the discussion moved to scaling up, Jajodia stated that IBM is “taking AI out of the labs and into the real world”.
He explained IBM’s complaints-handling AI agent, built on “solid, trustworthy” data which has been deployed at major banks including Lloyds and Nationwide Building Society. The complaints agent reads complaints, analyses them, categorises them, creates a draft response and then a person reviews it and decides whether or not to act on it.
Jajodia highlighted: “This is how you create a trustworthy AI.”
Blaga emphasised the need to shift the narrative around delivery of AI projects. She explained that with all the hype around AI, lots of business leaders look at the solutions and tools without focusing on the problems they are solving, which leads to a lack of clarity on how effecitive these solutions are.
“What I really want us to start doing is shifting the narrative around delivery. From talking about AI projects to actually talking about business transformation projects by using AI. This may seem like a subtle change, but I think it will really help reach the gap between business and technology teams.”
Napolitano echoed this statement, that companies should develop GenAI not for the sake of it, but for innovation.
Responding to a questions on AI training and AI’s impact on jobs, Jojodia noted: “Getting trained on AI is important for everyone. There might be 5% of jobs which will be removed by AI. There might be 5% of jobs which will be created by AI, but 90% of the jobs will change, because every job will have AI embedded in it, and therefore people need to learn how to use it.”
Drawing the conversation to a close, Napolitano noted how AI and GenAI have become buzzwords this year, but that “2025 will be the deployment of AI.”