Nobody's building more compute than the people asking to be slowed down.” 

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO.

NatWest is becoming a lot more efficient at delivering change, insists Paul Thwaite, CEO of NatWest at the Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference:

There's still work to do on digitization and automation. AI can help accelerate that, but actually, you don't need some of the probabilistic kind of outcomes there. You just need deterministic activity. There's still a lot of, what I would call, complexity in banks and certainly in NatWest that supports continued driving for efficiency...Where you have an investment envelope and you're deploying that investment to drive efficiencies, the quantum of change and therefore, benefit we can get from the same envelope is increasing considerably. Some of that is helped by AI, but not exclusively.

AI is now “kind of pervasive” across the whole organization, he says:

We see it through the lens not just of efficiency and productivity; we see it through the lens of customer growth and experience. I think it can be a big driver of deeper customer relationships. We're seeing that. It does build trust if you do it in the right way. And therefore, to me, it should be a platform for growth as well.

The reason for mentioning that is we don't just see it as a lever for efficiency and productivity. We also see it as a lever for efficiency and productivity. But we are seeing tangible benefits on both sides. On the efficiency side, whether it's the engineering and coding side, which is well trailed by many. But the benefits there are increasing, literally quarter-by-quarter, and actually, the engineering efficiency is outstripping some of the efficiency of the wider organization.

So actually the bigger challenge now is how do you get what we call kind of outer loop activity? So, not the pure engineering and coding, how do you get the rest of the activities, whether that's cyber risk or operating model deployment, to operate at the same pace as you can operate with AI-driven engineering?

Customer contact is another big source of both CX gains, but also efficiency improvement, says Thwaite:

The reality is, in the retail bank and, to a certain extent, in the smaller end of the commercial bank, customers are very comfortable and much more satisfied on some of the kind of low-value tasks for that to be executed, contained, managed well, supported by the whatever you call it, AGI or AI. So that's all operating, a lot of tangible benefits.

Overall, he concludes on the subject of AI:

I personally am an optimist around it. I feel as if there's big opportunities both to grow the business and to make the business more efficient. I don't subscribe that all the benefits are going to fall on the banks' bottom line. I think the benefits are going to be shared between the banks, the customers, in terms of I think some will be put back into customers. And I also think whether the tech companies, whether it's the labs themselves or whether it's the hyperscalers, will obviously take some of that AI dividend as it relates to banks and financial services.

My take - early successes safely in the bank.

The challenge in AI is not a tech challenge. The challenge in AI is a leadership challenge, how do you motivate and encourage all your people to use it and to use it without fear and to use it for the benefit of the customer and the shareholder.  

Thomas Buberl, CEO, AXA.

Insurance giant Standard Life has a digital issue and it’s down to demographics, says Group CEO Andrew Briggs:

If you  look across our total customer base, around 10% will have an active intermediary relationship, and where there's an active intermediary relationship, we work with that intermediary to serve the needs of the clients. But 90% won't have an active intermediary, and therefore, they'll turn to us for help and support and guidance as they journey to and through retirement. So the opportunity is massive, absolutely massive, because there are more and more of these customers getting into 50-plus age bracket. They've got multiple pension pots from different employments. They don't really understand it all, and they need help and support.

Delivering that help and support comes down to three things, he adds:

It's about having the right means by which to engage with customers. So the fact we're launching our first targeted support proposition later this year, the fact we're extending our advisers into inheritance tax planning is great and [latest acquisition] Aegon adding 100-plus new advisers really helps that engagement side. We need all the right products and services, and we have those in the pension space, but adding on the ISAs and general investment accounts just enables us to broaden and deepen that relationship with customers. So that's in train as well.

So most of the residual work is actually the digital infrastructure, that sort of third box, and that's basically about two real key elements. The first is getting our customer data into Customer 360, is what we call our customer database, hooking that in with the Salesforce CRM system and then developing a series of pro-active nudges to customers to engage them on that journey to and through retirement. At the moment, others are basically engaging them before we do, and that's why we have the outflows. We need to get that proactive engagement going earlier.

And then the second thing we need to do is basically sort of to drive up the coverage across that because the real focus there prior to the Aegon acquisition is the 7 million pensions and savings customers. Of those 7 million, 4 million are Standard Life branded and half of them are engaged with us digitally.  So let's get the other half engaged digitally.

And he knows that if Standard Life doesn’t deliver on this, others are waiting to pounce:

Others are pro-actively engaging our customers, particularly 50-plus year olds who have these multiple pension pots from different employments, don't really understand it all. And they are saying, well, we can help you with all of that. So the single biggest thing we need to do is to build out that digital engagement and proa-ctive nudges to our existing customers. The big advantage we have is we know who the customers are. We know more about them. We know where they live, they're our customers already. So in some cases, the customers are consolidating to another pot with another provider.

But more often than not, it's actually a new adviser getting hold of a customer or another player in the market that doesn't have any of the pots currently that are targeting them. So we have a real structural edge here with the scale of our customer base that, frankly, we're not fully leveraging at this stage. And it will be that pro-active engagement that will be the biggest differentiator there.

My take - a digital dilemma, but one that seems entirely solveable.

What's so exciting about agentic AI more than just generative AI is it's a technology that's going to enable us to do things we've wanted to do for 30 years. Charles Nunn, CEO, Lloyds Banking Group.

Enterprise software itself is changing, with three major changes happening at the same time, says Juilie Iskow, CEO of Workiva:

First, software can now do more of the work. For most of the software era, applications were built to help people do their job. With agentic AI, software can now take on more of the work.

Second, customer expectations are changing. Finance, risk, audit and sustainability leaders are being asked to move faster to manage more complexity, to govern data and AI and to do more with their teams. And they're going to expect more from their software, not just better tools, but technology that can actually take work off of their team's plates.

And third, the role of the business user is changing. Users aren't just using software anymore. They're becoming builders. They're building agents and automating processes and connecting systems and creating new ways to get work done. So they need more than just applications they can use. They need a platform that they can build upon.

Put these three changes together and enterprise software has a much bigger role to play. And that requires a different kind of enterprise platform.

That’s a growth opportunity for Workiva, she argues:

We have a strong business, a trusted platform, deep domain expertise, thousands of enterprise customers and a growing partner ecosystem. These are earned advantages and AI makes them more valuable. They give us the ability to make the business we have today stronger and more capable and to expand what Workiva can do.

That's why we don't have to choose between winning today and building what's next. We can do both. And we can do it from a position of strength, creating more value for our customers, expanding the opportunity for our partners and driving significant growth for our shareholders. That's why I believe the opportunity in front of Workiva is bigger than it's ever been. Our strategy hasn't changed; our ability to execute it has. 

My take - shift happens.

Living our lives the way AI tells us feels bad and dangerous. 

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO.