Investment banking is a people business. Clients pay generous fees in the hope of getting smart advice from analytical thinkers; relationships are managed deftly by silver-tongued advisers. An experiment by UBS raises the question of whether the humanity in high finance is overrated.
The Swiss bank has digitally cloned about three dozen of its equity analysts, generating short videos presented by lifelike avatars. They perform scripts based on the analyst’s research notes, complete with hand gestures and eyebrow raises. The AI is good but not perfect, so the result is slightly unheimlich. Still, the bank says the videos perform as well with clients as the old-fashioned kind.
Replicating living employees might be new, but the use of AI in banks is not. Mostly, employees rather than clients engage with it. Morgan Stanley has a note-taking assistant it uses during meetings; Goldman Sachs runs “co-pilots” to help with everything from coding to translation. Keeping the bots on the inside is rational: for brands boasting supernormal smarts, so-called hallucinations or communication gaffes can be corrosive.