GenAI In Credit Customer Assitance: Personalized Service or Manipulation?
There is a fine line separating manipulating customers and advising them.
McKinsey is going “bottom fishing” for bank GenAI use cases and picked customer assistance in credit and collections, the perfect place to steer unwitting customers.
But what makes it truly sad is that McKinsey knows full well that the European Union’s AI Act specifically calls out AI credit ratings and credit access as a high-risk activity!
While I consent that customer assistance is not the same as credit rating, banks will likely use GenAI to push credit products (access) on clients.
This will undoubtedly lead to a situation in which the prompts users receive from GenAI are heavily influenced by their credit scores.
Perhaps this “AI personalization” is good, but it all depends on the intentions of the bank deploying it. It is a very fine line in the sand.
After all, what bank would put their interests ahead of yours?
👉TAKEAWAYS
McKinsey’s use cases sound innocuous, but are they?
🔹 Productivity gains:
Transformation of a business domain such as collections with gen AI use cases involving augmentation, automation, and demand reduction can yield up to 30 percent productivity gains.
🔹 Gen AI as a low-cost, high-value performance booster
The most intuitive application of this in the customer assistance space is to analyze call recordings for comparison of interaction quality against a proprietary knowledge base of a call model.
🔹 Gen AI as a live copilot: Expanding frontline reach with real-time integration
Gen AI can serve as a copilot to boost the performance of agents in real time throughout customer conversations.
🔹 Gen AI as a customer-facing virtual agent: Bringing full power of automation
Create 24/7, empathetic support to customers and free up time for real-life agents
👊STRAIGHT TALK👊
McKinsey isn’t wrong to try to give banks a better way to “create a positive experience in the customer journey,” and the potential 30% cost savings are certainly compelling.
The use cases McKinsey outlines sound perfectly innocuous, but when GenAI becomes a copilot or a virtual agent, things can become far more complicated than McKinsey lets on.
GenAI systems can subtly steer or aggressively manipulate clients in a particular direction that is in the bank's best interest and, in doing so, limit access to financial services.
Consider this: when you dial into a bank and give GenAI your information, it will, without question, have access to your credit score. It makes sense, right?
Here’s where it gets interesting: The dialogue will be “personalized,” meaning that a client with a low credit score will likely not have access to the same prompts and products as someone with a high score.
You can say that’s great and shows personalization at its best, or you can call it steering access to credit and financial services! The latter is subject to regulation under the EU AI Act!
This is why I say that there is a fine line between advising a client and steering them in a particular direction.
That’s why I don’t think asking if GenAI will always have your best interests in its cold AI heart is a stretch.
Is it me? What do you see coming?
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