The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UK Finance or its members.

Generative AI represents one of those advancements that is just now beginning to reshape the banking industry. We believe there is an opportunity for the UK Financial Services industry to leverage generative AI to drive further operational efficiencies, customer engagement and increased productivity in the technology portfolio across the enterprise. Technology is at the core of business transformation across the UK Financial Services industry and generative AI has the potential to materially improve both the productivity and the speed with which technology gets built and deployed enterprise-wide.

IBM is currently working with banks across the globe, applying AI to help execute transformational programs. Early adopters of generative AI technologies are already realising benefits through operational efficiencies, productivity gains, speed of action and risk avoidance with operational cost savings of up to 30–40 per cent across areas like customer engagement, talent management and code modernisation and it is the promise of scaling benefits like these that is fueling widespread adoption. Given this early success, many banks are investing heavily to institutionalise generative AI at scale. 

When scaling generative AI, the question of how to safely exploit it is as important as where you are going to apply it. There are several scaling considerations for building trusted AI, including data privacy, IP, transparency and explicability, risks from early lock-in to any given model, compute and carbon cost, skills scarcity and, most important of all, governance.

Generative AI is all about people, so firms across the UK Financial Services industry need to make people and not technology central to their AI strategy. At IBM, we ran a one-month hackathon to train all our people hands-on with generative AI. This training was all based on our core belief in the power of a ‘show, not tell’ approach to getting a community to leverage this technology. Putting this technology into the hands of users, across all functions and lines of business—not just technology users—allows everyone to understand how transformative it can be to their role and the workflows around them. This approach also has the critical benefit of getting early buy-in from colleagues in legal and risk departments, showing them both what the technology is, and more importantly, what it is not.

There are three key takeaways firms should focus upon to enable a sustained and tangible ROI from investing in AI: Act with speed, Equip your people and Establish the foundation.

Join the upcoming webinar to learn more and see how IBM is already creating value for our clients with Generative AI.