"Despite concerns about AI replacing human jobs, there are clear opportunities for growth and investment within financial services"
Among office workers surveyed who work in financial services, almost two in five (38%) associate AI technology with creating 'robots or systems which replace human jobs’. However, when thinking generally about decisions made in relation to their current job, 49% of this audience said they would be more likely to trust decisions made by humans than AI, with just 7% saying the opposite. 28% said they would be likely to trust them equally.
Despite this, financial services workers are more likely than any other industry to believe technology that incorporates AI would be able to do a more accurate job at financial forecasting (49%) than a human.
59% believe data handling would be better handled by AI and 35% think AI could tackle IT, accounting and financial affairs better than human workers.
Headspring’s CEO, Gustaf Nordbäck, said: “The financial services sector is already benefitting from the impact of AI across a variety of applications. Due to the vast amount of data readily available in the industry, the opportunities to leverage AI and machine learning are massive. Among finance professionals, 30% believe introducing AI would reduce the number of people in their team. However, our research has clearly shown that even as AI rolls out more widely, there will always be a place for humans and human led decision making.
“With much talk of how the ‘age of AI’ is set to take over the workplace, it’s interesting to see how AI and specifically machine learning is being adopted in various industries in reality. Despite concerns about AI replacing human jobs, there are clear opportunities for growth and investment within financial services, with 32% believing their employer should invest in people and development before rolling out the technology, and 39% saying they should create a new role to manage it."
