How digital workers put AI to work
The Great Resignation wave has rapidly moved across the American labor force, exacerbating the pains of pandemic-affected companies. As customers demand not just increasingly digital experiences but impeccable and instant ones, enterprises like banks struggle to keep up. An emerging technology, such as machine learning-powered artificial intelligence (AI), is commonly proposed as a solution — we’ve all seen technically and intellectually interesting headlines in recent years. But wanting to apply AI and achieving business value with it are different things.
So how can banking and financial services companies successfully leverage AI to generate true impact?
AI-enabled Digital Workers provide an efficient path for positive business outcomes, better customer experience (CX), and improved employee experience (EX).
Painful CX, disengaged EX can’t be solved with tech alone
Virtually every enterprise is investing in digital customer interfaces. Online portals, mobile apps, chatbots, etc. all simplify business tasks, yet the user interface (UI) alone is not the full CX. Although it’s straightforward to receive a document upload or email, understanding and actioning them can be more complex. When large operational teams fulfill electronically received requests manually (and slowly), this essentially means the company has created a digital façade. And every second that a customer waits for a request to be fulfilled cuts into their expectation of an instantaneous experience.
These operational teams are doing what they can to deliver on customer requests. But, unfortunately, the work itself is often mundane — activities such as data collection, document handling, and false-positive clearing — which impedes engagement and lowers EX. This not only leads to an unproductive workplace but results in significant hidden costs and risk.
The technology is here to help, but tech needs help to help!
Technology is available to help, but access to tools alone doesn’t solve the problem. Yes, APIs solve connectivity of systems, but many crucial applications can’t leverage APIs. Yes, robotic process automation (RPA) helps solve for lack of APIs and manual use of systems, but often the data (especially documents and document-like data such as emails) needs more handling than a handful of definable rules can accomplish. Yes, optical character recognition (OCR) helps process documents, but with so many types of docs, especially outside of the Finance department and into the lines of business (LOBs), it’s not enough. Yes, machine learning (ML) — particularly natural language processing (NLP) and intelligent document processing (IDP) — works across layouts and templates, but ML-based tools need clean data to start, operate probabilistically, and need continual monitoring and control.
Conceptualizing tools as an intelligent digital workforce which can expand the capacity of a team helps simplify how and where these solutions help the organization.
AI and automation for impactful Digital Workers
The concept of “digital workers” has been around for years, promising 24/7/365 availability at perfect, consistent accuracy without fatigue. There is some level of truth to this, if the work is completely definable and codifiable into rules-based algorithms.
An AI-enabled Digital Workforce exceeds this consistency trait. Digital Workers are:
- Competent: Trained with data (securely) from multiple organizations and taught by subject matter experts in the tasks they automate.
- Curious: Able to learn and improve over time
- Capable: Leverage a full set of digital capabilities
- Collegial: Work seamlessly with traditional team members and pass escalations to the team as needed
- Cohesive: Applicable across the line of business, such as anti-money laundering (AML)
So, what does this new Digital Workforce look like?
Meet WorkFusion’s Digital Workforce
WorkFusion offers five digital workers for the banking industry:
- Evelyn, Entity Sanction Screening Analyst, analyzes and investigates sanctions alerts regarding entities, individuals and securities.
- Tara, Transaction Screening Analyst, analyzes and investigates payment alerts generated against sanctions screening lists originating from free-format SWIFT and FUF messages.
- Casey, Customer Service Coordinator, engages with customers for required information on account opening and other key processes via email.
- Darryl, Customer Due Diligence Program Analyst, captures and interprets ownership and legal structure information for customer onboarding or Know Your Customer (KYC) refresh initiatives.
- Kendrick, Customer Identity Program Analyst, ensures that proof of identity is captured and entered into systems of record for customer onboarding or KYC refreshes.
Putting AI to Work
A suspected cause of the Great Resignation is that people leave jobs where they just don’t like the work itself, often because it is mundane and seems to offer no future personal or career benefit. Simultaneously, a common cause of customer churn is slow, ineffective service. AI-enabled automation can solve pains in both EX and CX — a rare opportunity for a major, multifaceted improvement. But access to technology only goes so far… it needs to be productively applied. Experienced, skilled Digital Workers put automation in motion, empowering organizations to achieve the business outcomes their customers and employees expect.
