Last week a seven-year-old asked us what banks do. That question got us to pause. How do we explain a whole industry to a seven-year-old in less than a minute, keep his interest, and do justice to the answer? The simplest answer is that banks allow customers to change the timing of their cash flows. It’s really that simple at its core.
It was back in 2014 when researchers at DeepMind directed their nascent artificial intelligence application to the game Breakout. Instead of programming DeepMind on how to play the game, the researchers programmed DeepMind to learn about learning to play the game. That is a meta level that isn’t normally programmed but the result of that effort, combined with many others, was in the back of our mind when we turned some artificial intelligent tools towards customer data.
