Banks Still Far Away From Benefiting from AI: Accenture Study

In this digital era, banks are ideally placed to make the most of artificial intelligence (AI), but the industry seems uninterested in training employees in the skills required to handle AI-driven technologies.

If banks do re-skill their staff, they could boost revenues by 34% and raise employment levels 14% by 2022, says Accenture in its new study.

In the survey, bank executives said only one in four of their employees, on average, is ready to work with AI. Furthermore, only 3% of the executives said their organization plans to significantly increase its investment in re-skilling their workers in the next three years.

While banks recognize that human-machine collaboration is critical, few have acted to unlock the value, says Accenture.

“Banks’ lack of commitment to upskilling and reskilling employees to learn how to collaborate with intelligent technologies will significantly hinder their ability to deploy and benefit from them,” said Alan McIntyre, a senior managing director at Accenture.

“The only way for banks to benefit from applied intelligence is by ensuring that the data and systems are managed to be fair, transparent and accountable – and people are essential to training machines to achieve this ‘responsible AI.’”

Most of the employees surveyed seemed to be optimistic about the impact of AI, with two-thirds saying that it will improve their work-life balance and expand their career prospects.

“To benefit from the potential of AI, banks need to implement ‘applied intelligence’ – combining technology and human ingenuity – across all areas of their core business,” McIntyre added.

“To achieve this, they will need commitment from the highest levels of leadership and an understanding that this evolution will require a dramatic change in their workforce.”