Lately Artificial Intelligence or AI has garnered a lot of attention amongst the general public. Every day you hear about a new development related to AI. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the capability of machines to think on their own and implement tasks without human involvement. Technologies like machine learning, deep learning, image and speech recognition, etc. make this possible. AI is being used in many sectors like banking, ecommerce and healthcare to automate processes and save costs.
AI has shown great promise in the banking sector primarily because this sector has abundant data and AI can be used to analyze this data to draw patterns. Today’s consumers do not want to stand in a queue or go through tons of paperwork to get their work done. They have got a taste of technology and want to get things done instantaneously. Though a late entrant, the Indian banking sector has started adopting AI quite aggressively.
If you have recently accessed online banking, chances are you would’ve noticed a small chat box open up on your banks homepage. You can type your bank related generic query and you will get a response instantaneously. You might even be impressed with the quality of the response and want to commend the assistant at the other end. However this is AI at work. And you were chatting with software called chatbot. Sounds straight out of science fiction however AI is a reality today. Chatbot is designed to handle thousands of queries per second. It can address customer queries related to everyday banking tasks and it learns with each interaction. Currently chatbot provides information related to the banks products and services instantaneously to its customers. Going forward, it will handle real banking transactions also.
AI in Indian banks is not limited to the use of chatbots. Indian banks have developed what they call robotic software. This has automated most of the manual and repetitive processes in the banks. It has already shown great promise as response times for certain tasks has gone up by almost 60%. This allows employees to focus more on value added tasks and leave the manual repetitive tasks to software robots. The software robots are programmed to record and interpret information from systems, identify patterns and run business processes across various applications to execute tasks involving data entry and validation. Indian banks are also exploring the possibilities of integrating their robotic software with other voice assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant.
Another AI driven application in pipeline is the in store robot. This is still in the development stage however once it is approved for full fledged used, it will guide customers in the bank.
Indian banks are now collaborating with banking software companies to develop AI based solutions. They are competing with each other to stay ahead of the curve. It is evident that a large portion of their digital transformation budget is being assigned to AI and the spending is only going to increase in the future. Day is not far when all banking solutions would use AI in some form or another.