American Express (AmEx) is considering using generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) to improve its customer experience across its credit cards and bank offerings for businesses and individuals. The company will explore direct-to-consumer or small-business services as part of its experimentation, and see what works and what doesn’t. AmEx has transformed itself into a global fintech leader, steadily embracing new technologies throughout its nearly two centuries of existence. AmEx Digital Labs is a division of AmEx formed in 2017 that rapidly evaluates and tests new technologies and uses them to incubate new products that make their way to the rest of the company.
AmEx’s Approach to Using Generative AI
AmEx Digital Labs envisions using generative AI to assist with transaction approval as well as predictive analytics. The company would like to use AI for predicting how customers are going to do over time, and approving cards and lines of credit. Another major use case is customer sentiment analysis and customer interactions. AmEx Digital Labs is currently exploring ways large language models (LLMs) could be used “behind the scenes” to analyze all of the feedback and inquiries customers provide through AmEx’s existing customer service portals as well as unofficially on social media, and to understand how to deliver appropriate and helpful responses.
AmEx Digital Labs seeks to understand how it can help with its “3 Ps,” making a product more personalized to an individual customer, more proactive and more predictive. The company is currently exploring partnerships to use LLMs as it does not see itself creating its own LLM from scratch. AmEx Digital Labs sees a customer-facing generative AI based on an LLM as potentially useful, but for now, it is focused more on backend implementations.
AmEx’s Experimentation with AI
AmEx Digital Labs works by first building and prototyping products within its own small unit, before rolling it out to other parts of the company, ultimately turning over control to whatever team within AmEx is best equipped to lead that particular digital offering. AmEx Digital Labs created the company’s Rewards Checking account, a high-yield consumer banking offering, wherein customers earn rewards points for every dollar spent with their debit cards, then turn those points back into direct deposits. In addition, AmEx labs stood up the company’s “Pay with Bank Transfer” feature, which allows online merchants to include an AmEx-powered button among the payment options they accept.
Furthermore, because of the critical importance of its product offerings, affecting customers’ bank accounts and credit lines, and the associated hefty amount of government regulations in financial services, AmEx Digital Labs is cautious and secure when experimenting with AI. The company makes sure to approach all of its experimentation with AI very cautiously and securely. AmEx Digital Labs also ring-fences its experimentation with AI, referencing the broader security approach that limits software applications and the data they can access.
AmEx’s experiments with generative AI are in their earliest phases, but that is in line with many of its peers. A recent survey by KPMG found that 65% of 225 executives surveyed believe that generative AI will have a high or extremely high impact on their organization in three to five years, but 60% say they are still one to two years away from implementing their first solutions, and anticipate spending the next six to 12 months increasing their understanding of how generative AI works, evaluating internal capabilities and investing in new tools. Respondents in technology, media, telecommunications, and financial services said that researching generative AI applications is a high or extremely high priority in the next three to six months.
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