Discover Financial Services is looking to AI to help boost its coding and robotic process automation efforts.  

When implementing robotic process automation (RPA), “you don’t just say, all right we have automation, we’re done. … Because there are always opportunities to improve,” David Lyons, intelligent automation program manager at Discover Financial Services, said March 18 at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 in Nashville, Tenn.  

Intelligent automation and AI have allowed Discover to enhance its RPA technology, Lyons said.  

“That’s what’s really exciting right now … all of the intelligent automation capabilities and AI tools that are available to enable and automated core RPA responsibilities, platforms [and] processes.” 

The $152 billion financial institution is using AI to improve its RPA for: 

• Identifying the right processes for automation; 
• Generating value statements and building business cases; and 
• Generating code.  

“There are so many opportunities right now for AI to accelerate the automation lifecycle for RPA,” Lyons said. 

But while Discover is utilizing AI to get to the first step of code generation, it is not the answer for all coding, he said.  

There is still a place for people — engineers and developers — at Discover when it comes to coding, Lyons added, noting that AI “is not going to do everything. We’re not quite there yet.” 

More news from Bank Automation Summit US 2024 is available here.