Uma Ganesh | March 6, 2023 | It’s still early days, so firms are treading a cautious path.
Following the launch of ChatGPT and the excitement it has generated among netizens, businesses and academia alike have started to explore the potential use cases. In the financial services sector, not only does ChatGPT have the potential to increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks and enhancing customer experience but could also provide personalised solutions by harnessing the enormous data and resources available on the internet.
The ability of ChatGPT to maintain the conversational interactions and provide drilled down data to support the questions from customers has the ability to take customer engagement to elevated levels. Communication of varying types — repetitive, creative or research based, sentiment analysis, proof reading and such other content centric tasks which are typically time-consuming — are made much simpler with the help of ChatGPT. The initial versions of legal contracts could be expedited thus reducing the time taken in building voluminous documents from scratch and with the help of patterns identified, fraud detection could be made easier. It has the ability to equip the young executives with the knowhow and skills at the level of seasoned managers and could enable them to handle complex matters with ease.
Once ChatGPT’s capabilities are fully understood and integrated with the automated response system of the banks, this could possibly lead to reduction in the number of representatives deployed for handling queries and providing customer service.
Thus there could be innumerable ways in which institutions could exploit the capability of the tool to understand and respond to natural language. In summary, the opportunities it provides for enhancing customer intimacy with better awareness, building models with ease and increasing customer retention rate create a strong case for adoption.
At the same time there are also concerns about its nascent phase of evolution and reliability. These are early days for ChatGPT and in the coming months, we will see the refined identity of ChatGPT. Digital managers and risk officers would like to develop clarity on how the tool addresses the issues around customer data collection and analysis and the impact it could have on privacy and compliance related regulations. As the full implications are yet to be unravelled, many leading financial institutions are naturally adopting a cautious approach and have advised their employees against the adoption as of now.
There is also the apprehension that since a lot of unvalidated information is available on the internet, the responses provided by ChatGPT based on such information on which it is trained, may not be accurate. Whatever may be the reservations about ChatGPT or Bard or other such tools, Generative AI is here to stay. Sooner we start experimenting with it for select processes, the faster would the clarity emerge on how to extract the maximum impact.
Originally appeared in Financial Express