Banking transformation special: The agentic AI panel

And what we hope to do in this conversation next few minutes is just sort of talk a bit more about practicality.

So I'm not going to go deep on governance, but I am going to just wave my prop.

So if anyone is wondering about AI governance, this is the seminal work on the topic.

Governing the Machine.

It's written by Paul Donger, who's the head of AI ethics and safety at NatWest Group with a couple of co-authors.

So we won't talk about that too much, but if you haven't read that book and you're into AI governance and control, you should.

Stu, you're a bit more While we're learning and keeping up with and understanding how to leverage the platform play into the infrastructure of the enterprise, and I might get this wrong, but you tell us, for your function, you're kind of more on the sharp end.

And I think tools like Adobe, I think tools like Figma, I think design systems, creatives, all the CX, all the things that you're doing.

Is that the world that you play in? And where does AI...

Yeah, very much so.

It's as the owners of the creative gen AI tools across the bank.

So that's, as you say, things like Adobe Firefly, but various image and video and audio generation tools.

I mean, we're challenged by the governance piece to go back to your book, right? As a global bank operating in 60 markets, 90,000 people, we have to have a really stringent AI governance layer.

And we have that and we built that over the last five years.

But It's how do you turn that from being a hindrance or a blockage into being an enabler? A lot of the use cases that we deploy in the more creative field are very low risk in terms of they use very little data of the banks.

They don't touch customers.

And so from our perspective, we want to be enabling and be right up there on the forefront of what our competitors are doing and small organisations.

And so we're continuously challenging that governance layer.

It absolutely needs to be there, but we also want to have a route through it for innovative use cases that allows us to actually be at the forefront and be challenging the whole time with what's possible with AI.

And Stuart, are you using AI now more in the workflow? So it's three and a half years since ChatGPT, the first year or so.

It's what I refer to as sort of widget AI, which is you can still get it to write a nice bit of marketing copy or a landing page or something.

But where you really move the needle for a business outcome is end-to-end workflow.

And in the marketing flow, is that now starting to happen?

We're on the journey there.

I think by the end of this year, we will absolutely be there.

And what we hope to do in this conversation next few minutes is just sort of talk a bit more about practicality.

So I'm not going to go deep on governance, but I am going to just wave my prop.

So if anyone is wondering about AI governance, this is the seminal work on the topic.

Governing the Machine.

It's written by Paul Donger, who's the head of AI ethics and safety at NatWest Group with a couple of co-authors.

So we won't talk about that too much, but if you haven't read that book and you're into AI governance and control, you should.

Stu, you're a bit more While we're learning and keeping up with and understanding how to leverage the platform play into the infrastructure of the enterprise, and I might get this wrong, but you tell us, for your function, you're kind of more on the sharp end.

And I think tools like Adobe, I think tools like Figma, I think design systems, creatives, all the CX, all the things that you're doing.

Is that the world that you play in? And where does AI...

Yeah, very much so.

It's as the owners of the creative gen AI tools across the bank.

So that's, as you say, things like Adobe Firefly, but various image and video and audio generation tools.

I mean, we're challenged by the governance piece to go back to your book, right? As a global bank operating in 60 markets, 90,000 people, we have to have a really stringent AI governance layer.

And we have that and we built that over the last five years.

But It's how do you turn that from being a hindrance or a blockage into being an enabler? A lot of the use cases that we deploy in the more creative field are very low risk in terms of they use very little data of the banks.

They don't touch customers.

And so from our perspective, we want to be enabling and be right up there on the forefront of what our competitors are doing and small organisations.

And so we're continuously challenging that governance layer.

It absolutely needs to be there, but we also want to have a route through it for innovative use cases that allows us to actually be at the forefront and be challenging the whole time with what's possible with AI.

And Stuart, are you using AI now more in the workflow? So it's three and a half years since ChatGPT, the first year or so.

It's what I refer to as sort of widget AI, which is you can still get it to write a nice bit of marketing copy or a landing page or something.

But where you really move the needle for a business outcome is end-to-end workflow.

And in the marketing flow, is that now starting to happen?

We're on the journey there.

I think by the end of this year, we will absolutely be there.