The perspective on AI from Abu Dhabi Finance Week 2023

Written by Dave Wallace
8th December 2023

Abu Dhabi Finance Week is increasingly seen as one of the year’s top events for keeping up with the latest trends in the finance industry.

I truly believe that 2024 is the year that GenAI goes from talk to action

Held at the capital’s financial centre, the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the event was split across three days. Days two and three particularly interested me: day two focused on fintech, and day three on sustainability.

The fintech day was split into several tracks, one of which was AI. I was intrigued to hear the perspectives of senior people in the finance industry about AI, so I chose that track, as did many other attendees.

There was a lot to take on, but there were a few things that I picked out which were particularly interesting, which I’ll summarise here.

The headline speaker for the track was JK Khalil, General Manager MENA East for Mastercard. He set the scene with the following quote from Thomas Lloyd Qualls’ novel Painted Oxon, which I rather liked:

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods. We are each the heirs of that divine spark. Used wisely, the spark fuels one’s journey and lights the way. Treated carelessly, the spark consumes its owner and everything else in its path.”

The implications towards AI are apparent, and this was a recurring theme: this technology carries both opportunities and risks, especially with its latest incarnation, GenAI, being the stepping stone to true machine intelligence (maybe) and all that comes with it.

JK pointed out that AI has been around for a long time – the term AI was coined in 1955 – but the latest technology advancements have simply enabled the democratisation of AI.

He highlighted AI’s importance to fintech in particular, stating: “The fintech landscape is accelerating at an unprecedented speed to transform economies and the exchange of value. Data analytics and AI are the top technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that are powering fintech solutions.”

In the future, he predicts that the widespread integration of generative AI solutions will become commonplace, and we will see the rise of bespoke AI – specialised, smaller-scale solutions designed to ease specific pain points. For example, models that are focused and proficient in a particular function, such as legal or HR. He also mentioned that data will become a differentiator, with those organisations with good, clean data and sound data security being the ones that are likely to prosper.

There then followed a panel, and it was interesting to hear the perspective of academics such as Professor Merouane Debbah, who talked about the UAE’s Falcon LLM, which is being compared with Meta’s Llama 2 and Google’s Palm 2 in terms of performance.

Ronit Ghose, who runs the Future of Finance team at Citi, added a dose of reality by saying that there has been a considerable amount of interest and discussion around generative AI, but the truth is that very little has been done within corporations. He reiterated that AI has been around for a long time, especially in financial services companies in the form of machine learning and algorithms, so at any given moment, there are likely to be hundreds if not thousands of AI projects across an institution, but the number of GenAI projects is likely to be close to zero.

Other panellists echoed this perspective, and it’s a crucial point to consider—that little actual Gen Ai’ing has been done due to several factors, such as risk, lack of understanding, and opaque costs.

Ronit added that the amount of data and information within financial services companies makes them ideal candidates for the summation power of GenAI, and that is an area where he expects to see rapid adoption.

In a subsequent panel session, Arun Mehta, Head of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), said the pace of change in GenAI has been so rapid that the time has come to move beyond POCs to execution and pilots. He pointed out that Microsoft Office is starting to incorporate Co-Pilot, which has been embedded in Office applications such as Word and Teams, illustrating what is possible. His perspective is that businesses should now be starting to explore potential use cases.

Another fascinating presentation was by Rohan Doctor, who discussed his product, Louisa AI. Born out of a Goldman Sachs initiative to build an AI-led networking platform, Louisa AI was created to connect the knowledge of employees across the business. By understanding the knowledge of employees through parsing digital content, such as emails and documents, the AI can rapidly connect people across the company when a need arises. He gave an example of the AI determining that because one employee used to work for a prospect, connecting that employee with the sales team could help (and did help) close that opportunity.

Louisa is not a GenAI platform but a knowledge management tool. Its ability to use existing data without expecting users to interact with it directly is the secret to its success. Louisa AI has now been spun out of Goldman Sachs and is a standalone business.

All in all, it was fascinating to hear a range of perspectives.

My key takeaway is that there is much talk about GenAI but little action. I particularly liked Arun Mehta’s perspective: I truly believe that 2024 is the year that GenAI goes from talk to execution, from POCs to pilots and beyond!

About the author

Dave Wallace is a user experience and marketing professional who has spent the last 30 years helping financial services companies design, launch and evolve digital customer experiences.