Much has been made in the media around how artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to the eventual obsolescence of many current occupations, putting tens of thousands of employees out of work. It is widely assumed that jobs will be lost in financial services due to the deployment of AI across a wide range of functions. In fact, according to Autonomous Research, 1.2 million bank employees will be replaced by AI by 2030.

Yet that doesn’t tell the entire story. According to Accenture, financial services companies that deploy AI wisely will realize a net gain in jobs of 14%, and see revenues increase by 34%, by 2022. Although it is true that cognitive technologies will disrupt the current workplace, the biggest impact organizations are already seeing from AI is in the area of efficiency gains, as most of the human activities AI is replacing tend to be repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

For example, the growing use of optical character recognition (OCR) for reading tax returns and other financial documents, coupled with the automatic, intelligent mapping into spreading solutions may result in significant time savings and error reduction. Instead of a well-paid credit analyst or administrator taking on this mundane and repetitive task, they can now focus on higher-level work like deep analysis and decision-making – tasks that humans excel at in comparison with machines.

Much of the initial AI revolution will be focused on human augmentation, where humans learn more and more how to work with AI to accomplish a task. This calls for a mindset shift throughout the industry. People talk about “retraining” employees to work with machines, but the onus must be on the creators of the machine to redefine the experience to fit with how humans work.

In the end, some human roles will certainly disappear, as low-level functions are taken over by more-efficient bots and similar technologies. But humans will always maintain a critical role, especially in higher-level tasks where skills like strategy and decision-making, empathy and the ability to connect and form relationships are paramount.

Download the nCino’s latest white paper, “Ready to Launch: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Transform the Agile Enterprise into the Intelligent Enterprise” to learn more: https://www2.ncino.com/l/25922/2020-10-27/71j3tq