In the melding of tech and banking services the goal is an ambitious one to create a private banker in digital form a chatting knowledgeable persona that interacts with the consumer using twin high-tech engines of machine learning ML and artificial intelligence AI The ideal digital banker knows seemingly magically so about the consumers individual situation whether theyre starting a family for example and might be mulling buying a home Its suggestions about mortgage financing are helpful even intuitive and take the stress out of remembering to plan each step of a financial journey that is life-long and can get side-tracked amid the busyness of daily routine Easier said than done In a podcast interview with Karen Webster Dr Akli Adjaoute CEO of Brighterion a Mastercard company pointed out that the legacy machine learning and AI currently powering digital assistants like Alexa Siri and Cortana lack both adaptability and the ability to determine context More on context in a minute As a refresher and as has been seen by PYMNTS it should be noted that the data is available for AI platforms to adopt and adapt to bring robo-advisors to consumers along with the wow factor of anticipating what users want and need The fact remains though that successfully mining this data and using it to bring self-learning to those assistants has yet to be perfected Things are getting there it seems Adjaoute told Webster that advancement is still a ways off in terms of replacing humans with AI but harnessing Smart-Agents technology allows financial institutions FIs to get a 360-degree view of the consumer and their activities to make sure they are both secure and well-served The security Well weve already seen how unsupervised machine learning and AI can reduce reliance on rules-based fraud monitoring and cut false-positives drastically for banks As Adjaoute recounted in a past interview that means less friction in the consumer experience and a boon to both banks and the banked However when it comes to a robust services model flexible and marked by personalization ie as illustrated above where the virtual assistant anticipates needs before they are voiced some real fine-tuning is necessary according to Adjaoute The only way you can have a really intelligent assistant he said is if the virtual assistant is able to understand something without any pre-programmed language In other words they must go beyond stored and structured data they must rely on other words literally Context In Context Adjaoute gave an example The word apple can have a series of meanings It can refer to a computer cmon it is 2018 and its probably the first thing one thinks about a fruit or even travel as in a journey to the Big Apple True AI he said allows the system using the technology to find the true meaning of how a word is being used even when a word can have multiple meanings Its all about context He pointed to the principle behind Smart-Agents technology that creates a virtual tag to entities in this case words and builds profiles as these words are used There are as many smart agents as there are words each one tied say to every word in the English dictionary or to the German or French As these smart agents interact with one another they learn on the fly so to speak and no pun intended to put things in context Adjaoute maintained that it is context that matters when seeking to put the human factor into the services business in this case banking services No longer are rules universally applied to consumer interactions with FIs Instead the smart agents update their own profiles through each interaction and action learning how those consumers act as individuals Overall he said you have to get the technology to understand the fundamentals whats the meaning and whats the relationship because words are like poetry when you speak well Every word he added expands the scope and insight into what is being discussed and what outcome may ultimately be desired We as humans use context to extract the main idea and then we zoom down to the last sentence or the main idea he said We are really trying to reproduce the way our minds understand things and to put that with the Smart-Agent s technology he told Webster Against this backdrop he said there will most certainly be an increased appetite to use smart agents and smart technology to grow the service-related revenues of banks with an eye on client retention So rather than bombarding people with the offer or request that no one cares about if you concentrate on what is likely to interest them today and financial products they will use technology has no limits on what it can provide he told Webster I do believe that artificial intelligence is the way that will allow any business to onboard the customer serve them and deliver the absolute perfect service to them at the right time with the right products which will be beneficial for both FI and consumer