Why CIOs in banking must make AI explainable and trustworthy

The capabilities of AI-enabled tools are vast and transformative, with the potential to significantly enhance productivity, elevate customer experiences and pave the way for innovative products and services. In the banking sector, employees are optimistic about AI’s impact on their job security but unconvinced their banks can use AI responsibly.

According to a study by Gartner, 74% of banking professionals across diverse functions anticipate that AI will bolster the value of and demand for their roles. Additionally, 63% foresee an expansion of their role’s scope due to AI, while only 14% perceive AI as a threat to their job security.

However, though they may be confident in their own job security, only 38% believe that AI will increase job availability to everyone else. Moreover, only about half of bank employees surveyed think AI will strengthen privacy rights or create a more equal society.

This suggests that the challenge of adoption is not rooted in concerns over job security. Instead, employees express greater concern about the ethical implications of AI on their customers and colleagues. Therefore, it is important that chief information officers (CIOs) at banks understand this sentiment and work with other leaders to set responsible AI policies and practices that will improve AI tool adoption among employees.

Adopting AI

To improve employee adoption of AI, the Gartner study recommends that bank CIOs implement the following steps:

• Ensure that privacy protections and explainability are included in IT development and deployment standards for AI by promoting them on an ongoing basis, such as through governance agendas and project reporting. Such guardrails can help make AI decisions intelligible and assure staff that all stakeholder concerns are being considered and addressed.
• Monitor and prevent AI ethics breaches by maintaining a regular dialogue with senior business leaders on the use of AI and expect the same dialogue between CIOs’ direct reports and their business counterparts. This vigilance will help instil confidence among users and leaders.
• Co-sponsor governance oversight by collaborating with legal and compliance to operationalise AI ethics inside IT and across the bank.

Bank CIOs and other AI leaders still have significant work to do to earn the trust of their workforce. They can help secure that trust by making privacy and explainability fundamental requirements for AI tools.

Sensitive customer and employee data is essential to training AI models for many banking use cases. However, as AI becomes more ubiquitous in the industry, opportunities to leak this sensitive customer data will increase dramatically.

To tackle those data privacy challenges, CIOs need to adopt a multi-faceted approach. They should mandate regular reviews of vendor contracts for privacy controls and security while also staying abreast of emerging AI security tools to guard against adversarial…