AI could automate over half of banking jobs

A new report by Citi looks at the financial tasks that will be delegated to AI — and the new ones that will crop up.

Banking — more than any other sector — is ripe for disruption by artificial intelligence, according to a report out this week from the bank Citi. It finds that over half of banking jobs have high potential to be automated.

Time-consuming financial tasks likely to be delegated to AI in the future includes copying numbers from one computer system to another and synthesizing a bunch of financial information quickly.

“So if you’re an analyst and you’re reading an awful lot of documents, you can have the technology give you a quick and dirty summary of it,” said Sophia Bantanidis, an analyst with Citi.

She’s one of the authors of that new report that says AI could transform finance. Bantanidis said that while some jobs will disappear, there will be new ones too — like making sure the artificial intelligence is getting correct data to spit out the right results.

“But making sure also the organization is doing the right thing and that it is asking the machines the right questions,” she said.

Another thing that computer bankers won’t be as good at as human bankers? Dealing with human customers.

“The softer skills are going to become that much more important — talking to somebody, understanding what their needs are,” noted Gil Luria, a senior analyst at D.A. Davidson.

People still get the meaning of a wink and nod better than a computer does. Also, people know how to wink and nod.