This month, we're focused on how banks can survive and thrive in an era of Ai disruption. Our first guest is Rob Delaney with Carrick Capital. Rob speaks with us about where banks can focus their own internal AI efforts if they want to compete with fintechs, whether they focus on customer-facing applications or internal applications. He also discusses what the future ecosystem looks like in terms of how finance is being transformed.

This is our final episode in our month-long series on AI for search and discovery in banking, and this week we speak with Dan Courtright, Senior Director of Management at Iron Mountain. If you've ever taken out a loan from the bank, you know that there is a lot of paperwork involved. AI-enabled search and discovery applications could help streamline loan processing and loan origination, as well as help underwriting,  assess applicant risk. Dan and I discuss these use-cases in more in the final episode of this month's theme. AI-enabled search and discovery is one capability of natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence. For more NLP use-cases, download our latest resource at emerj.com/NLP1.

In this episode, we continue our theme on AI-enabled search and discovery in banking by interviewing Sheetal Rishi, Global Cognitive and Data Leader at IBM. She previously spent time McKinsey and Citi.  Sheetal speaks to us about which functional departments she believes there exists the most need for search and discovery applications in banking, and she discusses how the areas in which banks spend their money signals their motives for adopting AI technology.

This week, we speak with Luca Scagliarini with Expert System about a number of low-hanging fruit NLP applications within banking, including those for wealth management. He discusses where the advantage lies in terms of using NLP to decide on making investment decisions for clients. There's a lot of action in this space, and Luca does a great job of summarizing it. He also discusses where chatbots will go and how the customer interaction will change in the years ahead, including how customers will be able to use chatbots to take actions instead of just get simple questions answered.

This week kicks off our first episode in our month-long series on AI for search and discovery in banking. How can AI help us find data, find files, find documents within a bank's intranet? Whether we're looking for customer information, legal issues, or the right document, how can AI help? This week, we speak with Simone Bohnenberger-Rich of Eigen Tech about how banks can use AI to find documents that might require a review before the sunset date of LIBOR in 2021. This episode presents a great example of how AI for search and discovery can be used to maintain compliance and reduce risk.

This is our final episode in our series on building a culture of innovation in banks, our analyst episode in which Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella summarizes and adds insight to the interviews from this past month. In this episode, Daniel talks about the individual greatest factor in determining whether a bank has a culture of innovation or not: how well the C-suite can articulate an AI transformation vision.

This week, we speak with Mark Gazit, CEO of Thetaray, an AI vendor that focuses on financial fraud and anti-money laundering. Mark speaks with us from a vendor perspective about what kind of culture a bank has when it adopts AI the right way and what kind of culture it has when it adopts AI the wrong way. Mark also doubles down on the idea that the culture of innovation needs to be top-down, coming from the leadership team.

When banks, financial services companies, and even AI vendors servicing the banking landscape look to innovate in how they improve their customer experience, it's almost never because they want to service their most valuable customers today. It's almost always driven by what they know the next generation is going to expect. Whenever we do work for our clients, Millenials are almost always on the tip of their tongues. This week, we speak with Michelle Scarborough, Managing Partner of Strategic Investments and Women in Tech at BDC. from the perspective of both a banker and an investor about what innovation means for Millenials, as well as how banks can enable the innovation that will attract and retain this new generation of digital citizen.

This month's theme is the culture of innovation within banks. When we did our AI in banking Vendor Scorecard and Capability Map report and we asked bankers what the biggest barrier to AI adoption in banking was, the number one response was the lack of a culture of innovation within banks. And the question is: how do we change that? How do we cultivate that culture? In this episode, we interview Josephine Baliah, former Head of Client Experience Design at FirstRand Group, about having leadership that steps behind innovation. She talks about what the leadership can do and where it can be hired from.

This is the final episode of our September series on Strategic Recommendations for Bankers. My job this week is to connect the dots between some of the insights we got from our interviewees this month. This includes one common thread across interviews: banks have an underlying fear of the FinTechs popping up everywhere and eating market share.