Discover Financial Services is keeping customer needs and compliance at the forefront as it tests uses for generative AI. 

“We have to understand what is hype versus what is reality. We have to be very thoughtful around how we deploy those capabilities,” said Jeff Stone, senior director of digital customer service, conversational AI and employee experience solutions at Discover Financial Services, during Discover’s third quarter Intelligent Automation Roundtable Thursday. “When we’re in the business of supporting customers’ finances, we have to make sure that those capabilities are being used correctly.”

The $133 billion company is not necessarily focused on replacing its virtual assistant or natural language platform but is looking into how generative AI could help its internal teams operate more efficiently, Stone said, suggesting opportunities in marketing and risk management, for example.  

Internally, the financial institution’s team can improve the employee experience, “by taking advantage of these [gen AI] capabilities,” he said. 

Regulation top of mind

As Discover and other FIs explore generative AI, regulatory considerations remain a priority. 

That’s where Discover is prioritizing testing and gaining a strong understanding of outcomes and outputs of generative AI models, Stone said. 

“Every organization right now is figuring out how do you minimize those risks and maximize those benefits to deploy those [technologies] in ways that [drive] value for the customer and the company,” he said. 

The next step  

Discover has scaled its AI use in the past decade, Stone said. 

Since 2013, the bank has moved from text similarity, batch speech-to-text, natural language understanding, workforce forecasting and automated experience modeling to today’s exploration of generative AI.  

“This new set of capabilities around generative [AI] [is] going to be twice as valuable as the things we’ve deployed over the last decade, if we can get it right,” Stone said.