SHOULD THE COMPANIES THAT USE ROBOTS PAY MORE TAXES TO MAKE UP FOR LOST JOBS? BILL GATES THINKS SO.
“This isn’t … the world’s going to be run by robots or something like that,” chief executive Dave Mowat said. “I think it’s trying to find those spots in life, in the customer experience, where people really are looking for just an answer as opposed to a human interaction.”
Humanoid robots such as Pepper won’t be ubiquitous at the Big Five banks any time soon, but robots of the virtual variety are already hard at work in the financial services world.
From artificial i ntelligence- powered chatbots that interact with customers through a bank’s digital channels — online, mobile and social media — to programmable software bots that can perform administrative tasks such as processing mortgage applications, these virtual machines are being tasked with some heavy lifting.
All of Canada’s Big Five banks are using, testing or eyeing both chatbots for front- line service and software bots for the back office.
For example, Royal Bank of Canada has been testing chatbots — computer programs designed to simulate human conversation via the Internet — with some of its employees for at least 18 to 24 months, said Eddy Ortiz, RBC’s vice-president of solution acceleration and innovation.
Canada’s l argest bank hasn’t set a date for a wider rollout, but it will likely be a few more months of testing, he said. RBC is already offering e-transfers for its customers via voice- command with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.
“Consumers will have the ability to almost communicate with us — and, in some cases, even better — as if they were going into and talking to a human being anywhere at RBC,” Ortiz said.
Within t he past few weeks, Toronto- Dominion Bank has started piloting a chat bot via Facebook and Twitter with a small segment of its customers who are early adopters, said Rizwan Khalfan, the bank’s chief digital and payments officer.
“It’s going to be a lot of test and l earn, with the objective of ( how) can we create more f rictionless experiences on our digital properties, as customers are interacting with us more and more on our digital properties,” he said.
TD’s pilot involves testing simple tasks, such as helping to navigate customers towards transactions they want to perform, Khalfan said. But the goal for chatbots is to be proactively helpful in such ways as flagging upcoming bills and offering to assist in paying them.
Even ATB Financial has a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It is still in testing phase, but is now working with customers.
It is these virtual bots that will be most apparent to customers since Canadians are increasingly interacting with their banks digitally.
“Chatbots are more about increasing customer service, rather than cost reduction,” said Joel So, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Canadian financial services consulting practice.
But t he unseen automation technology being deployed in the banks’ back offices will likely have a bigger impact, particularly in cost cutting.
Over the past 18 months, the Big Five banks have begun using or testing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), software that can be programmed to perform manual, time- consuming office tasks modelled on the actions of a human user, So said.
Three of the banks already have them in use, and the other two have started or, if not, are close to using them, he added.
In as little as 12 weeks, software bots can be programmed to mimic processes that have been done by human workers, such as retrieving a document from an email, searching for a particular number and entering it into a database.
“In this case, you end up having virtual bots that sit on the desktops of the human users and perform those tasks in place of the human user,” So said. “In theory, that means the human user can be freed up to do more judgment-based creative tasks. In reality, it often means that human users are reduced, and that turns into cost savings for the bank.”
There is a hefty upfront price tag: an RPA bot that replaces one or two people could cost between $150,000 to $ 250,000 to create, So said.
“If you’re replacing two people, that payback should easily come in one to two years. You make the money back, and you continue to save the money from there,” he said.
So expects these “dumb” bots — an RPA bot is more akin to a robot on a factory line performing a series of pre- determined movements — in the next couple of years will increasingly be integrated with “smart” bots powered by artificial intelligence.
For example, a basic bot could power the process used in an insurance claims process, retrieving pictures of a car crash emailed in by a driver to start a claim, So said. But it could also connect with an artificial intelligence platform such as IBM’s Watson, for example, to analyze the picture and determine the number and type of vehicles involved, and trigger next steps.
Within three to five years, So expects it will be possible to install an artificial-intelligence-powered bot on someone’s computer and, over time, for that bot to develop a program to replace that role.
“A bot that watches a human user over hundreds of instances of a process, and basically learns the program for you ... That’s the holy grail of cognitive automation,” he said.
RBC’s Ortiz said all banks are looking at technologies such as AI to better streamline their processes not just to cut overhead, but to better analyze large volumes of data in a way that humans can’t.
For example, Ortiz is working on using artificial intelligence to detect fraud faster, he said in a phone interview from Korea.
“If we can identify patterns that happens with our clients ... And if we detect something that is not normal, that is out of pattern for that specific client, we can trigger processes around that very quickly,” said Ortiz, who is based in Florida. “AI will have a huge impact.”