Promoting responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Financial Services

The evening was started by Nic Clayton, Director, Communications & Marketing at CLS, welcoming the packed room to the event before handing over to Emanuel Vila, Director, Strategy & Innovation also from CLS, who moderated the panel:

Piu Banerjee, PhD – Executive Director, Head of Model Risk Management, CLS Group
Aditi Subbarao – Account Director, Snowflake
Felicity C. – Director, Trust in AI & Risk, PwC
Sophie Dalzell – AVP, Strategy & Innovation, CLS Group
Shirin H. – Investment Bank Tech (focused on AI), Deutsche Bank

We discussed how AI can help us today to:

1. Create
2. Summarise
3. Discover
4. Automate

We were encouraged to consider when we could use AI, but also when we might we not want to using the filter:

• Do I enjoy doing it?
• Can I do it?

Then we moved into a really interesting discussion, with so many stories and insights from our panel of experts – some highlights being:

• To see the real benefit of AI,  finding the right use case for us (or our colleagues or teams) is key. Once we start using AI, for usage to grow, people need to see how useful it can be to them personally – so they continue to use it. As one panellist put it, ‘ the adoption accelerates when people can taste the future’
• The most exciting opportunities are yet to be discovered. Agentic AI and the combination with robotics were mentioned as future topics for panels.
• The tech is here, but are we ready? We explored the importance of ensuring we manage the risks, especially looking at some of the lessons where AI has been biased and unfair, in particular the importance and challenges of ensuring it is fit to use in financial services.

Thank you to CLS for hosting, our panel and everyone who attended. Special thanks to Claudia Watkins for organising this inspiring event.