Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) has turned to US outfit DefinedCrowd for AI training data, outsourcing work that was done manually within the Japanese bank.
SMBC has been an enthusiastic early adopter of AI and was the first Japanese bank to deploy IBM Watson back in 2014.
But progress with the technology is limited by the sheer amounts of "training data" needed to coach the AI models.
For the bank's use of AI in automatic response processing, thousands of "question and answer" pairs needed to be prepped manually.
After proving that its training data could produce results as good as the bank's internal team, DefinedCrowd has now been given a contract to take over operations.
The deal is the first banking contract for DefinedCrowd, although the company does count MasterCard among it clients, alongside BMW and SoftBank.