Cutting through the noise: demystifying the buzz around artificial intelligence in financial decision-making

# September 2020

When artificial intelligence (AI) first emerged in 1956, there was no way to predict the magnitude of its impact. AI is an underlying element of countless technologies with which we regularly interact, and that are now a part of everyday life – from email to ride sharing to banking to media streaming.

A recurring theme in the AI discourse is its potential to enhance or even replace human intelligence. At RepRisk, we believe that AI is not a replacement for human intelligence, but rather a way to further it. Specifically, supervised machine learning is the most effective mechanism to further human intelligence, as it produces more relevant and timely data – criteria that are critical in fields like the financial services sector.

The financial services sector was an early adopter of artificial intelligence, as they quickly recognized its potential to generate alpha. Records of its use in finance date back to the earliest statistics-based models in the 1960s.