A Look Back: The 2023 AI Forecast for Banking

Jim Marous (0:00)

In February of 2023, Microsoft's Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services told me AI would become your co-pilot. Today, he runs Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Somewhere in between, your co-pilot became an agent. ChatGPT was barely two months old when Charles Morris and I sat down, and plenty of banks were still deciding where their employees could even use it. Charles admitted he'd never lived through such an inflection point like this one. Then he got specific. He said the human will stay the pilot and will stay responsible when something goes wrong. He walked through how CarMax used OpenAI's models to turn years of content into a few months' work with its own team signing off on the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with systems that actually hold the facts, which is the road our industry has taken since. A lot of this sounds obvious in hindsight. The banks and credit unions that treated as obvious in 2023 are the ones with the head start today. So keep score as you listen and stay for his answer on jobs near the end. He said the work would change and new kinds of jobs would appear.

Hold that up against what you're seeing in your institution. This is our first Flashback Friday podcast episode. Each week, we'll share one of our most viewed conversations and test it against what's actually happened.

Here's my interview with Charles Morris, now the Senior Vice President of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.

Where do you see this technology going? I would have said in the next three to five years, but even in the next one to three years, where do you see this technology actually evolving?

Charles Morris (1:40)

That is a really interesting question because I personally have not seen, I've not been part of one of these major inflection points before, to the point where I think it's really hard to make predictions. I think we're opening up a brand new set of capabilities that are going to be used in totally unpredictable combinations of ways, and we're just starting to see the very beginning of it with things like GitHub Copilot, with the new Bing search being really intuitive. But I'm telling you, this is a foundational ground shift in how people work with technology. This idea of a AI Copilot that helps you understand and helps you create faster. This is just something we haven't had before. When I'm writing code, it's not like it's writing exactly what I'm producing. But for me, when I'm staring at a blank piece of code editor, it is extremely intimidating to get started.

As you start to learn how to work with GitHub Copilot, you start to understand how to get it to prompt it, so that it gives you what you want. It's the same thing when I'm writing a document. I can start out with a couple of bullet points. Now I can generate a first draft of the summary I'm trying to do and get way far there. Then when it says something I don't want to say, that's actually helpful too, because I know that's not what I want to say.

Rather than sitting there banging my head against my desk, I'm so much more productive and it's because I have this AI Copilot in the mix.

Jim Marous (3:13)

You know, it's interesting because I was talking to you before the podcast. This is how I'm using it myself and that when I'm trying to write an article on a Sunday or some other day of the week and I'm trying to come up with some concepts, I'll send a question or my thought of what the question is going to be to ChatGPT and say, you know, what's your answer in this and not to help develop the copy, but to make sure I haven't left something out. In addition, as you said, if it comes back with a question, it tends to sometimes get into a bullet point format. I go, you know, I don't want this in a bullet point format.

It completely rethinks what it's talking about and positions in different way. It can give references, it can do a lot of things. And it seems like every time I'm playing with it, I come up with some other way of saying what I want to say. And it really becomes very powerful to realize that it can only go so far if you don't give it the right direction. But it can go really far if you give some unique directions to go. So, when you talk about the expanded use of AI as it relates to something like, let's say, financial reporting, compliance, I think this area, these are areas that could work too. These are pretty much, you know, they're developmental, but there's a lot of data involved. It can help in those areas as well, can't it?