Lack of skilled staff limits AI adoption in banking, survey finds

By Gaia Lamperti

Today, SambaNova Systems, a company delivering software and hardware solutions to run Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning applications, announced the results of new research into AI adoption within financial services organisations in the UK. The study of enterprise leaders sought to understand the challenges when delivering AI-based solutions during a period of accelerated change and transformation.

The data from the study shows that over three-quarters of finance technology leaders in the UK are already adopting AI models and algorithms. However, the study uncovered a number of clear challenges, from skills to technical, that are facing banking leaders today. The top challenges faced by UK financial companies in AI adoption highlighted in the research include:

• Keeping pace with the speed of model and data growth (78% of respondents)
• Hiring staff with appropriate skills in AI/ML (70% of respondents)
• Finding or customising models and algorithms (67% of respondents)

“AI is becoming a huge driver of value to businesses and is set to contribute trillions to the global economy over the next decade,” said Marshall Choy, SVP Product at SambaNova.  “Progressive business leaders are realising the value of AI. However, benefiting from it requires technology teams to deliver; this is where difficulty surfaces for most organisations in the financial sector. The research shows that financial services decision-makers understand the value they can derive from AI today. The rapid pace of innovation has presented challenges to technology teams in keeping up.”

Skills as the limiting factor

For banking leaders, AI is a driver of business value, and more than half (56%) said that AI’s business impact will be “transformational” or “significantly improve the business” over the next 12-24 months. However, technology leaders in financial service admitted that finding skilled staff across all technology disciplines is difficult.  The challenge is particularly acute in the specialist field of AI.

According to research by IBM, there is a large and growing skills gap in AI across Europe, with the sector struggling to find workers with enough AI knowledge or experience. Nearly 7 in 10 tech job seekers and tech employees in Germany, Spain and the UK believe that potential recruits lack the skills necessary for a career in AI, reveals the new study.

This comes as the war on talent continues to rage on, and at a time of increasing global competition, with skills shortages in tech, and AI in particular, likely to have a major impact on companies and countries.

Over half of IT managers reported to SambaNova that they have the budget to hire additional resources for their AI teams while 70% said that hiring skilled staff is challenging. Over half (52%) said that retention is a challenge too.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find an area of technology that is being developed more intensely than AI, especially around large language models such as GPT,” said Chris Kenny, General Manager, EMEA at SambaNova. “The opportunity these models deliver is there for the taking, although technology teams often don’t have the resources or expertise to take advantage of the opportunity.”

“For enterprises struggling to deliver on business leaders’ demands, deploying AI as a service is a fast track, a scalable way to avoid falling behind their competitors,” continued Kenny. “AI is already here at most financial organisations.”