Oracle VP: Generative AI Can Be Transformative for Finance

Generative AI is being integrated into a wide swath of industries, including financial services.

Early moves saw fintech Klarna as among the first companies to have created plugins for ChatGPT. And financial data and news giant Bloomberg created its own large language model called BloombergGPT to support NLP tasks in the industry.

There is more to come, though, with generative AI able to solve business issues in this space, according to Oracle’s Christopher Marsh-Bourdon.

Speaking at Oracle CloudWorld London, the global financial markets vice president said generative AI could be applied to use cases beyond what he described as the “easy low-hanging fruit” of using chatbots for customer service.

Marsh-Bourdon said generative AI and large language models could be used to reduce the barrier to entry to ML and data science.

He proposed the idea of banks deploying AI for risk assessment: using natural language prompts to ask questions to an AI system on permutations of a potential financial decision.

“That is much easier than having to go in and make a call to an API, or actually go in and type it in yourself,” he said.

Among the potential systems capable of such a task include BloombergGPT, which was built on a trove of financial data making it suitable for understanding the industry’s unique terminology. EinsteinGPT from Salesforce is another possibility. This model was built alongside OpenAI and can generate content for business cases that can be updated with real-time customer data.

Marsh-Bourdon, who previously served as CIO of cloud at Wells Fargo, said: “There are some amazing possibilities that we can use with generative AI and large language models. But there are lots of business problems we can solve as well.”

A 2023 Nvidia study found that large language models for creating personalized customer experiences were the top AI use cases for leading financial institutions. While Oracle Cloud offers its own prebuilt AI models, the company is collaborating with Nvidia, with the latter’s new generative AI cloud services available through DGX Cloud on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.