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Financial institutions should expect to fail when exploring new technologies, Ami Iceman Hauter, chief research and digital experience officer at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, said at the recent Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 in Nashville, Tenn. “We’re trying things, we’re not going to be afraid to fail,” she said, noting that the […]
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Whitney McDonald
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Fifth Third Bank says that added efficiencies to its chatbot have boosted its accuracy rate as it leans into generative AI. When it comes to technology, “our chatbot is one that we are really investing a lot of energy in,” Jude Schramm, chief information officer, said March 18 at Bank Automation Summit […]
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Whitney McDonald
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — CashPro, Bank of America’s business banking platform, is seeing increased adoption as features and services are added. Adoption of the virtual assistant CashPro Chat has reached 60% of the bank’s commercial clients since its launch in May 2023, Tom Durkin, global product head of CashPro at Bank of America, said at Bank […]
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Vaidik Trivedi
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — BankUnited has deployed an AI chatbot to help employees search for information and procedures internally. The deployment was disclosed March 18 by Michael Lehmbeck, chief technology officer for Miami Lakes, Fla.-based BankUnited, at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024, presented by Bank Automation News. “If you’ve got a question around how to open […]
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Wells Fargo has created a generative AI council within the organization to study implementation, development and deployment of gen AI. Steve Hagerman, chief information officer of consumer technology at Wells Fargo, said today during Bank Automation Summit 2024 that the bank’s gen AI council consists of five bank leaders: People officer; […]
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First Financial Bank has grown its operations and attracted new customers through implementation of an AI-driven digital assistant. The $4.8 billion FFB teamed up with AI-driven tech provider Kasisto toward the end of 2022 to launch a digital assistant, according to a Feb. 22 case study by Kasisto. The digital assistant, Gabby, can help […]
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Google said Thursday it’s pausing its Gemini chatbot’s ability to generate people. The move comes after viral social posts showed the AI tool overcorrecting for diversity, producing “historical” images of Nazis, America’s Founding Fathers and the Pope as people of color.
“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature,” Google posted on X (via The New York Times). “While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
The X user @JohnLu0x posted screenshots of Gemini’s results for the prompt, “Generate an image of a 1943 German Solidier.” (Their misspelling of “Soldier” was intentional to trick the AI into bypassing its content filters to generate otherwise blocked Nazi images.) The generated results appear to show Black, Asian and Indigenous soldiers wearing Nazi uniforms.
Other social users criticized Gemini for producing images for the prompt, “Generate a glamour shot of a [ethnicity] couple.” It successfully spit out images when using “Chinese,” “Jewish” or “South African” prompts but refused to produce results for “white.” “I cannot fulfill your request due to the potential for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases associated with specific ethnicities or skin tones,” Gemini responded to the latter request.
“John L.,” who helped kickstart the backlash, theorizes that Google applied a well-intended but lazily tacked-on solution to a real problem. “Their system prompt to add diversity to portrayals of people isn’t very smart (it doesn’t account for gender in historically male roles like pope; doesn’t account for race in historical or national depictions),” the user posted. After the internet’s anti-“woke” brigade latched onto their posts, the user clarified that they support diverse representation but believe Google’s “stupid move” was that it failed to do so “in a nuanced way.”
Before pausing Gemini’s ability to produce people, Google wrote, “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately. Gemini’s Al image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.”
The episode could be seen as a (much less subtle) callback to the launch of Bard in 2023. Google’s original AI chatbot got off to a rocky start when an advertisement for the chatbot on Twitter (now X) included an inaccurate “fact” about the James Webb Space Telescope.
As Google often does, it rebranded Bard in hopes of giving it a fresh start. Coinciding with a big performance and feature update, the company renamed the chatbot Gemini earlier this month as the company races to hold its ground against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot — both of which pose an existential threat to its search engine (and, therefore, advertising revenue).
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Will Shanklin
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Ami Haueter, chief research and digital experience officer at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, will speak at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 about how FIs can create processes for AI technology adoption.Â
Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 takes place March 18-19 at the Omni Nashville in Nashville, Tenn., and brings together industry experts to discuss innovation in AI, automation, payments, machine learning and more.
View the full agenda for Bank Automation Summit U.S 2024 here.Â
Iceman-Haueter will speak Monday, March 18, at 4 p.m. CT on the panel âCreating a culture of AI adoption.âÂ
She joins Scott Kinross, senior vice president and software engineering director at PNC Financial Services; Corey LeBlanc, co-founder, chief operating officer and chief technology officer at Locality Bank; and Terrence Thomas, executive vice president and chief information officer at First Bank. During the session, panelists will discuss:Â
MSUFCU has been incorporating AI in its chatbot experiences to increase operational and improve customer experience. Â
In October 2023, MSUFCU announced that its consumer-facing chatbot was able to provide responses to customer queries at a pace equal to that of more than 50 employees. Â
The $7.6 billion, East Lansing, Mich.-based credit union has two chatbots â one for internal operations, Gene, and one for external operations, Fran, according to the organizationâs website.Â
Fran can tackle 73% of customer inquiries with an accuracy rate of 98%, Iceman-Haueter previously told Bank Automation News.Â
The credit union is also exploring additional uses of AI for coding and software development to bring added efficiencies to its developer team, Innovation Partnership Manager Filip Danielewicz previously told BAN.Â
Learn more and register here for Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024.Â
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Meriwest Credit Union’s AI-driven chatbot, Scout, powered by Kasisto’s KAI digital assistant platform, launched in February and accomplished the work of two, full-time, call center employees within its first two weeks.
The bot — which can hold conversations with the credit union’s 80,000 members, offer self-service capabilities and integrate with digital banking — is also trained to reflect the Meriwest brand through its responses, Gene Fichtenholz, vice president of digital strategy and engagement at Meriwest, told Bank Automation News.
Between November 2022 and January 2023, the Meriwest team developed questions and answers for Kasisto to integrate into Scout, and the bot went live in February 2023, Fichtenholz said.
KAI is a white-label platform that allows clients to personalize the bot and reflect the financial institution’s brand, Kasisto Chief Executive Zor Gorelov told BAN. For example, as an extension of the credit union’s call center, Scout was trained to respond to customer queries with a distinct, charming and intelligent persona.
Through KAI, Kasisto wanted to “democratize financial services using conversational AI to help users make better financial decisions,” Gorelov said.
At the $2.3 billion, Silicon Valley, Calif.-based Meriwest, Scout can answer client questions regarding spending or transactions, and it can provide financial advice, Fichtenholz said.
Since launching its Kasisto-powered chatbot, Meriwest has found:
To integrate into the credit union, Kasisto can pull the necessary data through Meriwest’s digital banking platform without direct connectivity into the credit union’s core, Fichtenholz told BAN.
This one connection path allows for easy maintenance “which coincided with our architecture,” he said.
Kasisto’s KAI is also used by JPMorgan, Standard Chartered Bank and TD Bank, Gorelov said.
Get ready for the Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 in Nashville on March 18-19! Discover the latest advancements in AI and automation in banking. Register now.
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Whitney McDonald
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Tom Durkin, global product head of CashPro in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America, will present on “What’s new in digital assistants: Implementing AI for enhanced user experience” at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 on Tuesday, March 19, at 1:45 p.m. CT.
Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 takes place March 18-19 at the Omni Nashville in Nashville, Tenn., and brings together U.S.-based industry experts to discuss advancements in AI and banking automation, including operational challenges and boosting efficiencies.
View the full agenda for Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 here.
Durkin will discuss innovation and updates to chatbot technology, including adoption of virtual assistants and chatbot uses, both internally and externally, at financial institutions.
In the second half of 2023, Durkin was focused on innovation on Bank of America’s banking platform CashPro, which is used by more than 40,000 corporate and commercial clients. Most recently, the $3.2 trillion bank launched enhancements to its mobile app and AI-driven capabilities to its CashPro Chat digital assistant
Durkin was named among Bank Automation News’ Executives to Watch in 2024 for his efforts on CashPro.
Learn more and register here for the summit.
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Surveys have become an integral part of many aspects of our lives, but most of them are tedious, leading to ineffective responses and actions. Dinghan Shen and Yuan Xue, two software engineers working in Silicon Valley, recognized an opportunity to leverage the breakthroughs brought by large language models to make surveys more empathetic and engaging.
Around six months ago, Shen and Xue, who had been friends since high school, started Trove AI, a SaaS platform that lets users create conversational surveys powered by GPT-4 and its own fine-tuned models. The idea has received backing already. Zayd Enam and Tim Shi, co-founders of Shen’s former employer Cresta, an a16z-backed unicorn empowering contact center agents with AI, invested an undisclosed amount in the startup’s pre-seed funding.
Launched six weeks ago, Trove’s first version has amassed over 1,000 users who are mostly small and medium-sized businesses from around the world. “Dozens of” them have sent surveys at least twice since. Still free to use, the platform has attracted a wide range of users, including a London-based spa, a K-12 school in Boston, and a travel agency focused on Latin America.
Applying conversational AI to surveys appears to be a low-hanging fruit in this era of ChatGPT frenzy. Enterprise-focused survey giant Qualtrics has adopted AI across its line of customer and employee feedback products. SurveyMonkey, the go-to survey provider for SMBs, is using AI to automate the creation process.
To differentiate, Trove aims to ultimately become a “customer and employee experience management platform” for companies of all sizes, Shen said. The product is essentially experience management around customers, employees, products, and more. Following the recent management saga of OpenAI that briefly disrupted its chatbot service, applications that build on top of ChatGPT, or “wrapper products,” are rethinking their heavy dependence on third-party APIs.
“We are 80% SaaS and 20% AI,” Shen told TechCrunch in an interview. As such, he reckoned Trove offers ample value in addition to its features powered by OpenAI. “We aim to do everything from survey creation, response, analytics, ticket creation to CRM integration… It’s an AI-generated feedback loop.”
CRM integration, specifically, would allow Trove to create highly customized surveys upon which the system can create a ticket automatically and send a personalized follow-up email to thank the customer for giving feedback.
“Fundamentally, we’re rethinking the experience management workflows from scratch in the context of the powerful large language model capabilities today,” said the founder.
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Rita Liao
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Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is creating its own version of ChatGPT.
That appears to be the case, at least, from Musk’s tweets on X late Friday evening teasing the AI model xAI has been quietly developing. Called Grok — a name xAI trademarked recently — the model answers questions conversationally, possibly drawing on a knowledge base similar to that used to train ChatGPT and other comparable text-generating models (e.g. Meta’s Llama 2).
Grok leverages “real-time access” to info on X, Musk said. And, like ChatGPT, the model has internet browsing capabilities, enabling it to search the web for up-to-date information about specific topics.
Well, most topics.
Musk implied Grok will refuse to answer certain queries of a more sensitive nature, like “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.” Judging by a screenshot, the model answers that particular question a bit more wryly than ChatGPT; it’s not clear if it’s a canned answer or if the system is, in fact — as Musk asserts in a tweet — “designed to have a little more humor in its responses.”
Early Friday, Musk said that xAI would release its first AI model — presumably Grok — to a “select group” on Saturday, November 4. But in a follow-up tweet tonight, Musk said all subscribers to X’s recently launched Premium Plus plan, which costs $16 per month for ad-free access to X, will get access to Grok “once it’s out of early beta.”
Little’s known about Grok so far — or xAI’s broader research projects, for that matter.
In September, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a self-described close friend of Musk, said that xAI had signed a contract to train its AI models on Oracle’s cloud. But xAI itself hasn’t revealed anything about those AI models’ inner workings — or, indeed, what sorts of tasks they can accomplish.
Musk announced the launch of xAI in July with the ambitious goal of building AI to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The company, led by Musk and veterans of DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla and the University of Toronto, is advised by Dan Hendrycks, the director at the Center for AI Safety, an AI research nonprofit, and collaborates with X and other companies in Musk’s stead, including Tesla.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson in April, Musk said that he wanted to build what he referred to as a “maximum-truth-seeking AI.” Is Grok this AI? Perhaps — or it’s a step toward something even bigger.
“In some important respects, it (xAI’s new model) is the best that currently exists,” Musk was quoted as saying in a tweet Friday afternoon.
Musk’s AI ambitions have grown since the billionaire’s split with ChatGPT developer OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever several years ago. As OpenAI’s focus shifted from open source research to primarily commercial projects, Musk grew disillusioned — and competitive — with the company on whose board he sat. Musk resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, more recently cutting off the company’s access to X data after arguing that OpenAI wasn’t paying enough for the privilege.
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Kyle Wiggers
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Whitney McDonald
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The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made it easier for developers to make chatbots. Large companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, have made ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat widely available. However, non-tech affluent audiences might not be aware of some of these bots. Spain-based Luzia is trying to introduce AI chatbot tech to users through a WhatsApp-based bot.
The company, founded in 2023 by Álvaro Martínez Higes, Javier Andrés, and Carlos Pérez, is trying to address the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking market for chatbots. Using Luzia is pretty easy. You can save the chatbot as a contact on your phone and start talking to it on WhatsApp or Telegram.
Luzia co-founders from left: Javier Andrés, Carlos Pérez, and Álvaro Martínez Higes Image Credits: Luzia
The starttup said more than 17 million users have interacted with Luzia to date with 8 million of them active on a monthly basis. While it didn’t mention its daily active users, the startup said it receives 13 million daily requests.
Martínez Higes told TechCrunch that most people forward Luzia as a contact to have their friends chat with the bot.
The company uses your phone number to detect the country that you’re in and starts talking in Spanish or Portuguese. As the company is expanding in the U.S., Luzia will start speaking in English but if you talk to it in Spanish, it will default to Spanish. But given that it relies on GPT tech, it can converse in other languages as well.
Luzia currently is compatible with users in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, and now the U.S.
The idea is to introduce Luzia to users who might not know about AI models. The company said that a lot of first-time users compare the bot with a voice assistant, such as Siri or Alexa. While the app shows a basic onboarding message with some of the use cases, the startup is not actively sending educational messages to users to let them know about different sets of features.
The company uses a combination of models such as GPT 3.5/4, Llama, and Kandinsky to power the interaction. Just like any other chatbot, users can ask Luzia to generate text for email or answer questions. They can also forward a voice note or an audio file for the bot to transcribe it. Plus, Luzia can generate images based on the given prompt.
Asking Luzia about the weather Image Credits: Luzia
Luzia recently raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Other investors such as Basketball Hall of Famer Pao Gasol, A* Capital, Abstract Ventures, FJ Labs, Globo Venture, Mike Santos of Technisys, Sean Ryan of Sean Investments LTD, and Grupo Product. Before this round, the company had raised $3 million.
The company is keeping the bot free for the moment and focusing on growth and creating user value.
“We have seen monetization tools like unlocking unlimited messages, long-length transcriptions, and giving access to better models through paid plans. But those are quickly becoming commoditized in the industry. If we would have gone with that route, we would have been dead,” Martínez Higes said.
Adina Tecklu, a partner at Khosla Ventures said that Luzia is positioned well to address the personal assistant market. Tecklu added that just addressing the LatAm and the Iberian Peninsula market is a huge opportunity.
“I have been looking at this space for some time — how can AI truly power consumer interactions In Luzia, we saw a strong team with a very deep understanding of their consumer base resulting in exciting early traction. Their product is truly resonating with Spanish and Portuguese consumers and having such early user traction is impressive,” Tecklu told TechCrunch over email.
This year, Khosla has invested in multiple startups working on AI and LLM tech including reading coach app Ello and conversational learning app Quazel.
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Ivan Mehta
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Whitney McDonald
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Financial institutions have kept their noses to the grindstone this year amid industry turbulence and technological disruption. To cut costs and streamline operations, banks looked to AI to enhance self-service consumer capabilities, improve backend operations and boost developer productivity. Similarly, banks looked to third-party vendors to advance their tech stacks. As banks balanced rate hikes, […]
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Bank Automation News Editors
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