Sentient bot? The AI we don’t see is the AI banks should invest in

A GOOGLE engineer has put artificial intelligence (AI) under the spotlight in recent weeks with claims that a computer chatbot had become “sentient”, capable of reasoning and thinking at the level of a human child. While the company quickly set the record straight with an official statement to the contrary, this episode is the latest example of how far AI computing has come – and how poorly it is understood.

Chatbots, or text generation programmes, are certainly among the most visible and easily understandable applications of AI. But these – and the debate around computing sentience – are little more than a sideshow to the true potential of this gamechanging technology.

At its core, AI allows more complex processes and decisions to be outsourced from human to machine, enabling industries to operate at a new level of efficiency and – crucially – far greater speed.