How we’re leveraging GenAI for human-centric insights

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) presents a massive opportunity. As individuals, many of us are already using tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to be more productive in our day-to-day work. Many of our corporate clients, too, are exploring the possibilities of this exciting new technology. As a bank, Absa is already exploring a wide array of GenAI solutions aimed at transforming our client experience.

The change is rapid, and it’s hitting hard, but we shouldn’t let the hype around GenAI distract us from critically assessing its real value. I come from a financial and strategy background rather than an IT background, so I see technology through the lens of improving our client value rather than the glamour surrounding it. From that perspective, I believe that GenAI enables us all to exponentially grow our human creativity, empathy and problem-solving abilities. I’m most excited about how it will allow Absa to reshape our relationship with our clients.

Banks have such a wide range of problems to solve, and GenAI offers such a wide range of potential solutions that it’s difficult to know where to start applying the technology.  I do believe, though, that it should be applied to create something new – and not just providing us a way to do the same thing quicker.

Investment decision-making is one area where we could see immediate impacts as we combine GenAI with digital twins to simulate the results of certain decisions. Currently, a lot of human capital is used to research fund options and assess client risk profiles, gathering information from a variety of sources, including PDF documents, recorded webinars, and so on. Appropriately used, GenAI can identify the appropriate sources and summarise the findings very quickly and at scale. GenAI can also assist with credit decision-making, as it can gather, collate and process complex information from multiple teams. In both use cases, GenAI provides the research that gives humans the data we need to decide the next steps.

This is a key differentiator for banks – not only in our enhanced research ability, but also in our deeply human insights and creativity.  Banking is moving beyond viewing technology just as an enabler, and more as a differentiator in how it creates better value for clients and enables us to better understand our clients.

It also covers a blind spot that many banks have. In our industry, we sit with an inherent bias when we engage with our clients, as we see them through a banking lens. We instinctively want to put our clients in a particular category or offer them a specific generic trade deal. But what if we had a richer view of them and their ambitions beyond this generic banker’s view?

GenAI pushes us to approach financing differently, thinking in new ways about our client relationships and how we market our suite of products. It forces us to think more holistically about where our clients want to grow and where their opportunities are.

That’s where GenAI technology will have its greatest impact: in the fundamentally human field of relationships. It allows us to understand our clients better, to see the world through their eyes and to offer solutions that we might not have previously considered.

Technology need not create a divide between what is human and what is digital. These two worlds should not be binary, with tech as the 1 and humanity as the 0. Instead, it can create a space where our work happens at a human level, powered and scaled by digital capabilities.

And as that starts to happen, we’ll see the competition between banks taking on a new shape. Instead of fighting to see which bank can be the most high-tech, GenAI will drive us to see who can be the most human and the most intuitive.