As Summer Ends, the ‘Age of Summaries’ Begins for Gen AI

Summaries, summaries, everywhere. Generative AI is enhancing consumer experiences by providing quick, insightful summaries within many commonly used digital products. As summarization becomes a popular mainstream tech feature, banking leaders must adapt to this new 'Age of Summaries' to enhance both customer engagement and employee efficiency.

Consumers are beginning to expect summarization.

Generative AI is settling into the mainstream consumer experience. It is increasingly powering quick summarization of detailed lists, references, documents, images, conversations, and more. In Google Search, the top-of-page “AI Summary” has become a hit with consumers. Apple Intelligence, unveiled in detail this month, will offer summarized text conversations, summarized photo collections, and be on tens of millions of iPhones by this time next year. Soon, none of us will need to pick through individual search results, texts, or camera rolls. The age of summaries is here.

Banking tech is leveraging the power of generative AI summarization.

Beyond popular consumer tech, employee productivity tools across financial services have increasingly introduced generative AI summarization capabilities. In fact, summarization is more or less the most common “horizontal” use case for generative AI in the enterprise as we reach the end of 2024. Across many verticals within banking, one of the more common capabilities is summarizing large data or recordsets into condensed and actionable insights. These use cases include loan approval, platform observability, CRM, marketing, fraud detection and mitigation, call center, and more.

This week, at Celent’s Generative AI Symposium in New York City, we’ll be joined by banking, insurance, academic leaders, and Oliver Wyman experts to dig into the present and future of generative AI in financial services.

Over the summer, big tech and early-stage fintech firms have employed the summarization capability of generative AI within new banker-support tools that automate and speed the delivery of value to customers while potentially reducing operational costs for banks. Platform hyper-scalers like Google, AWS, and Microsoft have rolled out new Gen AI tools for the middle and front office, purpose-built for financial services. It would be drastically oversimplifying to say that these only summarize large content and data sources. They do a lot more. But most, in some way or another, employ the power of summarization to reduce the time and effort required by employees to collaborate, process, and deliver great work.

The future of customer engagement will include summarization and insights.

At last week’s Finovate Fall conference, Generative AI summarization was a key feature in most of the product demonstrations from fintechs. While much of the customer-facing generative capabilities on display seemed still a bit too incremental to previous-gen AI, it was the generative summarization features for bankers, across nearly every product line, that promised rapid change to the way work is, and will be done, in the near term.

But what about the customer experience? The banking industry has spent at least the past decade catching up to consumer digital product design. “Modernized” customer experience and “digital channel transformation” have often been shorthand for “meeting customer expectations created by leading consumer digital products.” Now that many innovative consumer banks have achieved top-notch digital products, a brand-new curve is emerging. To keep up, banks will need to understand and embrace the age of summaries.

Digital banking leaders should realize that…

• Your customer will increasingly expect summarized, valuable information during interactions.
• Digital channels will be under pressure to deliver an enhanced, summarized layer of financial and service information at initial access (right after user authentication).
• Making a customer pick through lists of transactions to determine what’s important will not be tolerated.
• Banks that fail to get proactive about finding and surfacing important insights will face stronger headwinds against deposit retention and relationship expansion.
• Employees will increasingly expect features in their workflow and productivity tools that summarize, automate, and save time.
• Modeling the ROI of these enhancements ahead of time will be difficult; they will just be added to existing tools by vendors, and they will be used. In many situations, the tools will necessitate new ways of organizing and working.

We’ll have a lot more to share on this topic after our Generative AI Symposium conversations next week. Please reach out if we can help continue the discussion within your organization.

For a more complete exploration of purpose-built generative AI tools in banking, see Celent’s recent report, Field Guide to GenAI Hyperscalers: Banking Edition.