By Zor Gorelov, Kasisto Co-Founder and CEO
Generative AI has Ushered in a New Era in Banking
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the topic of our time. The release of ChatGPT for public consumption in November 2022 marked a turning point in the way business and society think about AI and its impact on our lives. Consumers raced to use ChatGPT as this new digital raconteur reached its first 100 million users in only two months and became the most rapidly adopted technology in history. Investors and big tech firms redirected their resources toward finding creative ways to capitalize on this rapidly emerging trend, while policy makers, risk officers, responsible AI and ethics experts, as well as educators scrambled to assess its impact on business and society.
The public reactions and speculations followed fast. Many analysts and industry leaders suggested that generative AI now represents an economic advancement at least as important and disruptive as the introduction of the PC, the Internet, and the mobile phone. Goldman Sachs predicted that as many as 300 million white collar jobs could be lost or degraded. And – just like the uncertainty and excitement that was produced at the onset of the prior tech waves – individuals, businesses, and financial institutions mobilized quickly to consider: how will this new technology impact the way we work?
At Kasisto, we believe that this latest AI surge is indeed transformational. And as a conversational AI company that is dedicated to the financial services industry, it’s our responsibility to shepherd this technology, while guiding our customers and partners to better understand it, stay ahead of it, and leverage it to ensure the success of their consumers, their employees, and their businesses. There is a “right way” to apply generative AI in banking, and the answer, we believe, will result when financial institutions lean into AI as a way of augmenting their customer-facing teams, with always-on, just-in-time delivery of financial knowledge.
The Journey to KAI-GPT
Today Kasisto unveils KAI-GPT, the world’s first banking industry-specific Large Language Model (LLM) and KAI Answers, our first generative AI application, powered by KAI-GPT.
We’re confident that this combined product offering will enable bankers to begin working with generative AI to create superior customer experiences that blend the best capabilities of AI and humans. Kasisto’s KAI-GPT and KAI Answers provide a means for financial institutions to achieve these objectives at a comfortable pace that is both a good fit for their brand aspirations and meets their employee and customer needs.
Since day one, Kasisto has been committed to delivering the financial services industry’s most humanizing digital experiences through KAI, our conversational AI platform. From our origins at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), creators of Siri, Kasisto was forged as a conversational AI company dedicated to serving the banking industry. And we’re grateful that our financial clients choose to rely on KAI technology to build deep, long-lasting customer relationships while, at the same time, optimizing their cost to serve and improving employee performance. We’re humbled to have had several opportunities during the past decade to achieve banking innovation milestones that have led us to today.
In 2016, we launched the world’s first chatbot for digital banking, in collaboration with DBS. This marked a turning point in the banking industry, showcasing the power of AI-driven conversations to serve customers.
In 2018, we brought to life Olivia, the first-ever “digital banking employee,” in partnership with Liv, Emirates NBD. Olivia represented a new era in using AI to augment banking staff and improve customer care. Olivia is a digital teammate who provides personalized assistance and demonstrates how conversational AI can transform customer experiences.
During 2019, Kasisto began its first research and development of large language models (LLMs) with the launch of K-Bert, which was designed specifically for financial services use cases. This R&D effort laid the foundation for further advancements and eventually paved the way for the development of KAI-GPT.
In 2020, we forged a strong partnership with NCR in a quest to introduce KAI to the community banking market and deliver world-leading conversational capabilities at scale to financial institutions that wouldn’t otherwise be able to access them. We quickly developed new partnerships with other digital banking providers, like FIS and Q2, who enabled us to expand and facilitate a wider variety of financial conversations. Today, we’re proud to serve a large and growing array of credit unions and community banks.
Introducing KAI-GPT – Purpose-built for Banking
Today, we launch KAI-GPT, a culmination of our leadership in the conversational AI space and a reflection of a decade focused on building expertise, accumulating insights, and curating a corpus of knowledge in banking.
This new cutting-edge technology is developed exclusively for financial use cases, and we believe it sets a new standard for conversational AI in banking. Harnessing the power of generative AI, KAI-GPT satisfies the financial services industry’s unique need for accuracy, transparency, trust, and customization.
Accurate: KAI-GPT is purpose-built for banking. It ensures precise, reliable answers covering a wide range of banking use cases. We understand the intricacies of this industry and deliver tailored solutions to meet its specific requirements.
Transparent: We provide full visibility and auditability of the training methodology and training sources used to build our Large Language Model. We believe in maintaining transparency to allow our customers to have complete confidence in the technology they deploy.
Trusted: Financial institutions trust us to protect their most valuable content assets and intellectual property. We prioritize data security and privacy, and we uphold the highest standards in safeguarding personally identifiable information (PII). Ultimately, we steward our clients’ brands with deepest respect.
Customizable: Our solutions can be customized to meet the unique needs of any financial institution. We leverage, but never store, their specific data and content, empowering them to create a personalized conversational AI experience that aligns with their brand and business goals.
Powered by KAI-GPT, KAI Answers is a leading-edge generative AI application that empowers bank employees on the front line of customer care. By sorting through massive amounts of financial content to find and deliver the right answers quickly and efficiently, KAI Answers delivers a contextual, human-like conversational experience. This revolutionary solution enhances productivity and enables bank employees to deliver exceptional service to customers.
Technology that is Tested and Proven
From our earliest days in the research lab, Kasisto has always been committed to technical excellence, and our customers around the globe have come to expect it. We take great pride in the combination of scientific pedigree and real-world solution-building expertise represented by our team of AI and language scientists, software engineers, and product delivery specialists.
To that end, you can rest assured that KAI-GPT’s ability to accurately answer questions in proper context has been put to the test and successfully proven. When compared with two separately compiled test data sets, KAI-GPT significantly out-performed the baseline model and compared very favorably with OpenAI’s ChatGPT model. These tests have helped to validate our hypothesis that an LLM, when infused with Kasisto’s unique corpus of conversational banking data and combined with precisely curated financial content can perform on par or better than models compiled with substantially greater parameters and requiring significantly more horsepower to operate and tune.
Now that we’ve trained KAI-GPT and seen how it provides a performance boost for the KAI Answers application, we will continue to advance its capabilities and expand its coverage. We are committed to ensuring that KAI-GPT remains highly performant and accurate.
The Future is Now … We Hope You’ll Join Us
At Kasisto, we are confident that the future of banking will be powered by a combination of AI and humans working together to advance financial knowledge, to promote smart financial decisions and, ultimately, to perpetuate wellness and prosperity.
In this hyper-connected world, where human beings can access information of all sorts simply by speaking or typing their intentions, AI provides the key to democratizing access to financial services, consistently and across channels. So when bankers and banking consumers need answers, we at Kasisto will be there with them, finding and presenting accurate, personalized, helpful information that enables better financial decisions in that moment, and beyond.
We hope you will join us there.
