It's not the future, Deep Learning is right now
Recognise your potential
Imagine if you could make explicit the ‘best of the best’ decision-making of your underwriting or claims personnel, to reveal and harness, again and again, the thinking and facts behind their decisions.
Your business is almost certainly sitting on an untapped gold mine of data, both current and historic, such as documents and emails with their attachments, all stored and accessed using core business applications and other filing or archive systems.
Once used and filed this data (the majority of which will be unstructured – text and images), is rarely ever viewed or used again. It is the larger part of your ‘corporate memory’ representing the collective knowledge of transactions, decisions, and communications usually stretching back over many years.
Yes, you can augment your capability with new data with IoT sensors and other sources, but your current decision making is based upon lessons learned over many years.
Structured data recorded in your core business applications is tiny in comparison to the knowledge, wisdom and memory locked up in these unstructured assets.
Your competitors
Your competitors are already using or starting to deploy Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, though few are yet to leverage their ‘corporate memory’.
Some of your competitors may already be funding or working with new entrants such as FinTechs and InsurTechs who are unconstrained by legacy thinking or infrastructure. They have no ‘corporate memory’ and no history of business transactions, relationships, or communications – they are in effect data poor.
Their ability to do things like exploit Deep Learning to evaluate and rate risks will initially be constrained, unless they buy or are gifted ‘history’ by one of your traditional competitors.
FinTechs are not simply competitors, they are future innovators changing your market to better benefit and attract your customers. Many are championing new business models and proudly state that they are ‘Technology companies that happen to offer Financial Services’.
Don't give your advantage away
It is becoming apparent that there is a danger of businesses accidentally passing on their data advantage to ‘BigTech’ through liberal licensing terms governing the use of their data. This can apply to both “free” and paid for AI powered services.
While recognising that you own your data, many of these licenses grant BigTech companies a perpetual unlimited right to use your data in developing their AI product, perhaps in competition to you.
BigTech will definitely have the ‘benefit of the high ground’ if multiple traditional businesses cede their data advantage, especially if BigTech consumes new market entrants and becomes another, much more powerful, Financial Services competitor. A sobering thought…
