That ChatGPT means serious business is undisputed. The AI tool from OpenAI has been a majorly disruptive force in several fields in a short span of time. It has become so popular that if one doesn’t know what it is, they are probably living under a rock.
ChatGPT has been mostly associated with the education sector, authors, and academics. But such has been its versatility that it has found its way into other sectors and verticals. Expectedly, it has marked its entry into the financial sector. That is not to say that banks and other financial institutions have not been using AI in some form or the other thus far. They have, but most users, institutions, and customers had not entirely grasped the full potential and implications of AI proliferation until ChatGPT arrived on the scene.
Advantages of using ChatGPT in the financial sector
The benefits of ChatGPT in any sector are pretty obvious. It can do a lot of work that would otherwise fall on humans. That, in a nutshell, is a big advantage. And this is true of the financial services sector as well. Obviously, then, there’s a lot that ChatGPT can do instead of financial advisors.
Till about a decade ago, financial advisors were not really taking recourse in social media. Today, they are as much into it as anybody else, with videos, memes, and textual content becoming a normal form of business communication. Tools such as ChatGPT can support the processing and dissemination of communication and promotional content, enabling financial advisors to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
ChatGPT can also enhance efficiency by enabling financial advisors to engage with clients in a personalized, compelling, and engaging manner. Financial advisors can use ChatGPT to synthesize the data available in different formats and on different resources, compress it into an easily understandable form, and load it into a chat interface. It can, thus, generate personalized marketing campaigns, prepare portfolio review meetings, summarize the minutes from a recording, and so on and so forth.
By making mundane, repetitive, everyday tasks easier, ChatGPT can free up the time of financial advisors, allowing them to focus on more complex and value-oriented tasks. If used properly and conscionably, ChatGPT can give a major boost to productivity. Financial advisors will have more time to spend fostering good relationships with their clients and exploring ways to provide a more experience-centric service.
AI proliferation isn’t without drawbacks
While ChatGPT can do all these wonderful things and make the life of financial advisors easy, it comes with its own set of challenges. The biggest drawback is the most obvious one: It is not human. That, in itself, means it is not intelligent enough to replace human financial advisors.
Unlike a human advisor, it can only provide generalised information and not personalised financial advice tailored to a customer’s specific requirements. Besides, it is likely to provide inaccurate or half-baked information, which can have serious repercussions in a high-stakes sector such as finance. ChatGPT has been known to give wrong answers at times; it has also been observed that it may give solutions that seem plausible at first glance but are actually incorrect or not backed by in-depth knowledge.
So, it is advisable to treat ChatGPT as an accessory to augment human capabilities. If used judiciously, intelligently, and effectively, it can unlock more value and positive outcomes for customers. At this stage, the emphasis should be on fine-tuning and course-correcting it to make it as proficient as possible.
