ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Embedded AI: It’s being ‘woven into the fabric’ at Wells Fargo
is for Augmented Artificial intelligence is becoming ‘part of the business fabric’ at Wells Fargo, according to its Senior Vice President, AI Enterprise Solutions, Bjorn Austraat – a utility as essential and anonymous as electricity. For now, at least … For decades, science fiction has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is on a crash-course with humanity: that minds superior to our own will inevitably wage war against their creators, coding inhumanity into the superhuman brains of the future. But there’s always been a parallel discourse – subtler, perhaps, than the space operas and rampaging robots of the silver screen – which imagines humans and machines forging a closer and closer union. These futurists argue that, following this theory, we’d combine ever-tighter into ‘cybernetic organisms’. The human would evolve, inexorably, into the cyborg. Even as certain experts grumble that AI has dramatically under-delivered on its hype, it’s difficult to deny that we’re on our way to cyborg sentience – in our
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communication, our consumption and our digital-first workplaces. But we’re not there quite yet, according to Bjorn Austraat, whose position as senior vice president of AI enterprise solutions at Wells Fargo gives him a panoramic view of AI’s current and future applications. Like a diplomat on the Star Trek Enterprise, Austraat’s role sees him mediate between organic brains and cybernetic minds – finding ways in which they can collude and collide productively. “Many years ago, in my very first job in Austria, I was an interpreter – working at conferences, at the United Nations, as a translator,” he says. “Back then, I helped people understand each other; today, I jokingly say I have the same job, just that now it’s focussed on translating between the languages of business, data science and engineering. And those languages and
cultures are quite different. The challenge comes in tying them together: getting them aligned, balanced and moving in the same direction.” Contrary to fears that AI is set to eclipse the need for human intelligence in the workplace, Austraat sees its smartest application – in banks and elsewhere – as working in synergy with our own minds: an alliance of computer IQ and mankind’s EQ. “AI is really best used when it’s augmenting, so we speak of augmented intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence,” he says. “Because it’s augmenting people, it frees them up from very routine work or things that are simply not possible. “AI is very poor at having empathy or common sense, or creativity. So those are the qualities that we absolutely want to free up humans, from their routine work, www.fintech.finance