Earlier this week, NatWest announced its collaboration with IBM to add generative AI to their chatbot Cora, making it Cora+.
We spoke with John Duigenan, global leader, financial services industry, IBM, about this product and future collaboration between IBM and NatWest.
Duigenan highlighted that IBM and NatWest have worked together before and previously helped build a virtual assistant. As generative AI has gained popularity and IBM's own platform watsonx was being developed, Duigenan said NatWest was exploring how this new technology could “enhance their client experience and simplify the development of virtual assistants in the future, making them more feature rich and more able to answer unanticipated questions with generated answers built from a trusted source.”
Cora+ doesn’t obtain its information from large language models like ChatGPT, instead it is trained on “trusted sources”, which may be the NatWest website, a customer service handbook, or a product description. The AI is not providing financial advice, but is providing details of specific financial products provided by NatWest.
Additionally, Duigenan pointed out that IBM's watsonx is able to explain the answers that it generates, which has become a key point for many concerned with ethical AI.
Deigenan described that from the perspective of “a designer of a virtual assistant, you have to focus on anticipating every single question that someone will ask. So it could be anything from ‘where the branch is’, to ‘how do I send a payment’, to ‘what's the best mortgage for me to choose’. Anticipating the range of every single question and programming your response to that actually is arduous both from a design and implementation point of view.
“The reason why generative assistants actually have huge value is because using a trusted body of knowledge and a large language model, we can actually generate answers to questions asked into the virtual assistant by NatWest clients, NatWest customers, and answer those questions in a way that we had never programmed or anticipated.”
He added that from a productivity perspective, there is upwards of 30-40% improvement compared to conventional customer processes.
Regarding the timeline for the roll out of Cora+, the AI tool is already in use, with Duigenan noting: “The new assistant is already deployed in production for a set of users that NatWest have determined, they will determine a further rollout scope for all of that. Naturally, watsonx is a platform that continues to evolve. We're continuing to add new features, it feels like every week. I'm very confident that NatWest will continue to incorporate new capabilities from IBM into their virtual assistants and other technologies at the bank as one of a set of trusted AI providers.”
It was also announced that IBM is extending their partnership with AWS earlier this year. However, the collaboration with NatWest is the first public banking partnership where a product such as this has been created. Duigenan added that he fully expects that "our partnership will go from strength to strength, and we're already exploring other areas to work with them."