This is the final installment in a four-part series on disruption in the payments industry. Read part one
Across industries, there is rampant concern that generative artificial intelligence — the kind that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is powerful enough to take jobs from human workers. But to some degree, that trend was already underway before the popularization of gen AI.
“A lot of financial services companies are IT shops,” said Luke Penca, head of emerging technologies at the consultancy Capco. Goldman Sachs, for example, employed 10,000 engineers, representing
“They’re always hunting for an information advantage,” Penca said. “They’re going to process ever larger volumes of data, be more and more real-time and things like that. These are use cases that are perfect for the deployment and application of AI.”
What gen AI adds to this process is its ease of working at scale. It’s best at handling quantities of data that are so massive that simply throwing more people at the task won’t be enough to dent it, Penca said.
The technology can also be trained to handle single tasks well enough that, if a person’s job is focused on that task, that job can be handled by AI. There are still caveats; customer-facing interactions may seem like low-hanging fruit, but large language models like ChatGPT can be easily manipulated (intentionally or otherwise) into giving
Nevertheless, some companies have already taken the plunge and committed to shifting certain tasks from humans to gen AI. Here’s the current state of things throughout the financial services industry:
