Financial services execs investing in generative AI: report

Financial services executives in Canada are ahead of their global peers when it comes to investment in generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Over one-third (38%) of Canadian financial services executives said they’re investing in generative AI, according to a report from Broadridge released on Thursday. That compares to 24% of executives globally.

Generative AI learns the patterns and structures of input training data to generate new output with similar characteristics, such as videos, images and text.

While three-quarters of executives globally were confident about their firms’ digitalization generally, Broadridge found that the leaders had made gains in talent and culture initiatives compared to the non-leaders. For example, 44% of leaders were making moderate to large investments in generative AI, which was more than twice the number of non-leaders.

In Canada, 28% of respondents said they’ll increase their investment in AI over the next two years, and nearly eight in 10 (79%) agreed that AI will lead to significant improvements in customer service. Top priorities for front office included customer interaction, portfolio management and product development.

However, 43% of Canadian respondents were worried that growing cybersecurity threats will impact their digital transformation. Data security and privacy was a top corporate and IT priority for many firms globally.

The survey was conducted in November 2023 and included 500 C-suite executives, and their direct reports, from 18 countries. The assets under management of companies sampled ranged from US$1 billion to US$250 billion.

Jonathan Got

Jonathan Got is a reporter with Advisor.ca and its sister publication, Investment Executive. Reach him at jonathan@newcom.ca.