- ChatGPT will have real-world applications in financial services.
- Experts say it will be used to enhance productivity and elevate existing tools.
- Here’s how the chatbot could impact six different areas of Wall Street.
Experts have predicted ChatGPT’s impact on a variety of industries, and it appears Wall Street will be no exception.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the subject of public fascination recently. Microsoft poured $10 billion into the startup during its most recent round at the end of January, which reportedly valued the startup at $29 billion.
ChatGPT is a chatbot that generates conversational written responses to a user’s questions and prompts by using generative artificial intelligence that recognizes and mimics human speech patterns while dispatching encyclopedic knowledge. From churning out grammatically-correct but substance-lacking school essays to giving sound advice on how to negotiate a raise, playing with the chatbot is a fun pastime, but people have begun to wonder the impact it could have on across a multitude of industries.
It’s still early days — ChatGPT was released to the public in late November — but experts already expect ChatGPT and its underlying tech to be utilized as a productivity-enhancing tool in finance.
“It’s going to automate select tasks that knowledge workers are engaged in today so that they can focus on higher-value tasks,” Dylan Roberts, partner and principal at KPMG, told Insider.
ChatGPT has the capacity eventually to replace humans in certain roles, according to some, but the realization rests in the customers’ hands.
“Technology will be able to do it. The question is, do customers accept it or not?” Peter-Jan Van de Venn, vice president of global digital banking at consulting firm Mobiquity, told Insider.
However, ChatGPT does have at least one issue specific to its application to finance. The product is “black-boxed,” according to Charles Hearn, the chief technology officer at fintech Alloy, meaning the AI can present answers without being able to trace how it got to those answers. That process can make it difficult to meet some regulatory requirements in financial services.
Others are skeptical of ChatGPT’s ability to revolutionize industries and doubt the likelihood that it is the end-all be-all for white-collar workers. One Princeton professor even called the chatbot a “bullshit generator,” The Markup reported.
But Dev Patnaik, CEO of strategy and innovation firm Jump Associates, said dismissing tools like ChatGPT so quickly is a mistake.
“You are using all of your brain power to stack up reasons of why the future is not going to happen rather than think and reason about what you’re going to do about it when it does,” Patnaik told Insider.
But while you mull on whether or not to pay attention to ChatGPT on Wall Street, some are already putting the tech to work. At Sweden private-equity giant EQT, ChatGPT is enhancing the firm’s 7-year-old AI platform it built itself, according to Alexandra Lutz, who heads up EQT’s AI-powered Motherbrain.
“Now, not only can we bring a perspective on ChatGPT and what it means, we can bring examples to senior leadership, to the portfolio companies to help them understand this is not hype, this is real. There are ways that you can use this and you can start using it tomorrow,” Lutz said.
Insider spoke to five industry experts to get their take on how ChatGPT and its underlying tech could be applied to various sectors of financial services.