Accenture: Banks could raise revenues 34% by investing in AI and upskilling

A new report from technology consultancy firm Accenture has revealed that banks could see revenues rise by more than a third by 2022 if they invest more readily in artificial intelligence.

With the digital skills gap widening all the time, much of this investment will need to be focused on reskilling existing workforces in order to maximise this opportunity.

To highlight the ever-increasing digitisation of the working world, the World Economic Forum recently predicted that 65% of children entering primary school today will seek employment in jobs that do not exist within the current market.

However, in a survey of 100 banking executives and another 1,300 non-executive bank employees, Accenture found that just 3% of banks intend to significantly increase their investment in reskilling over the course of the next three years.

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“Banks’ lack of commitment to upskilling and reskilling employees to learn how to collaborate with intelligent technologies will significantly hinder their ability to deploy and benefit from them,” said Alan McIntyre, Senior Managing Director at Accenture, and Head of the company’s banking practice.

“The only way for banks to benefit from applied intelligence is by ensuring that the data and systems are managed to be fair, transparent and accountable – and people are essential to training machines to achieve this ‘responsible AI.”

As many as 74% of those surveyed said that they believe the banking industry will be transformed by intelligent technologies, whilst 75% of employees place a high importance on developing the necessary skills in order to work with intelligent technologies.

Nevertheless, if banks fail to invest readily in facilitating this and fail to actively prepare their workforces, the industry will be unable to make the most of the beneficial technologies that are increasingly becoming available by the day.

“Banks – indeed, all financial services firms – have work to do before they can even determine how best to employ intelligent tools,” said Andrew Woolf, Talent & Organization lead for Accenture’s Financial Services practice.

“They can start by building an enterprise-wide strategy focused on applied intelligence, reimagining how work is done today and determining what steps they need to take to move to a state of advanced collaboration, where humans help AI to help humans.”

For more information, see the full Future Workforce Survey – Banking: Realizing the Full Value of AI report from Accenture.