After numerous experiments, American Express (Amex) aims to utilize AI technology for approving credit lines as well as providing predictive analytics
Update (May 31): This article has been updated to include factual corrections from an American Express public relations spokesperson.
A recent report from VentureBeat states that financial services provider American Express (Amex) nurtures plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve its customer experience across its credit cards and bank offerings for businesses and individuals, analyze customer sentiment and interactions, and more.
Amex has long experimented with artificial intelligence within the activities of its Digital Labs unit. Its team of 100 tech experts is reportedly launching about 20-25 pilots each year to discover the best ways to serve Amex clients via technology innovations. The unit integrated Mezi, an AI digital assistant that makes customer travel booking recommendations, into an AmEx mobile app, later acquiring the company behind Mezi and appropriating the technology for some of its financial services.
At the same time, the firm currently doesn’t look into developing its own large language model (LLM) as many companies try to do to compete with the industry leaders like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Amex executives feel content enough to use the partners’ technology for their own purposes.
The main goal of the company is to facilitate certain internal processes and speed up approval for its customers with the help of AI. Namely, Amex is going to use AI for “predicting how our customers are going to perform over time, enabling better financial planning and decision-making,” says Luke Gebb, senior vice president of American Express Digital Labs.
In addition, AI will be utilized to receive actionable insights from customer interaction data. To analyze customer sentiment, generative AI tools might treat customer feedback as a database, export relevant pain points and suggestions, and generate action prompts.
This will cover the vast scope of AmEx’s existing customer service portals, as well as unofficial feedback and inquiries posted on social media. Expectedly, AI services will help the firm to better understand the customers’ needs and deliver appropriate and helpful responses.
Although Amex Digital Labs does see potential in customer-facing generative AI chatbots introduced by many retailers, for now, the company is focused more on backend implementations.
