Enhancing Customer Experience Is Top Driver For AI: PwC-FICCI Report

Sudipta Ghosh, Partner & Leader – Data & Analytics, PwC India, said, “The Indian Financial Services sector is already using AI as a key enabler for enhancing customer experience, improving operational efficiency and managing business risks.”

Enhancing customer experience is the top business driver for Indian financial services organisations to implement AI as per the PwC-FICCI report titled, “Uncovering the ground truth: AI in Indian financial services” with 83% of survey respondents citing it as the reason for AI implementation. Additionally, more than 80% of the survey respondents from the banking and financial services industry say that they have deployed chatbots to make customer servicing easy.

Sudipta Ghosh, Partner & Leader – Data & Analytics, PwC India, said, “The Indian Financial Services sector is already using AI as a key enabler for enhancing customer experience, improving operational efficiency and managing business risks. Maturity of using and adopting AI-enabled solutions with a deeper understanding of  not just the business case, technology and data but also the risks around security, privacy and accountability will differentiate the leaders from the rest.”

Jyoti Vij, Deputy Secretary General, FICCI, said “The adoption of AI in the financial services industry is increasing at a rapid pace offering opportunities to both reduce costs and generate new revenue sources. The applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in data analytics and customer service can enable more personalised and faster customer experiences, provide much better insights and support automation of back-end workflows offering greater operational efficiencies. While both fintechs and incumbents are putting together plans for adoption of AI, data quality and access to data as well as access to suitable talent are seen as major obstacles to implementing AI.”

Key highlights:

  • Top use cases: 82% of the survey respondents say that they have deployed chatbots to make customer servicing easy. 65% of them have deployed fraud detection AI engines, making it the second most common use case in the FS industry, followed by 56% who have deployed virtual assistants.
  • Top business drivers: 82% of respondents listed enhancing customer experience as the top business driver for implementing AI. Improving productivity (57%) and increasing revenue (56%) were the other main goals for adopting AI.
  • Top concerns: 60% of survey respondents cited the privacy of consumers and security of data and the approval of the use of AI engines as the biggest concern for AI implementation. Additional areas of concern were the  integration, operationalisation and maintenance of AI infrastructure, and the very distinctive and progressive skills required for success in AI.
  • Data architecture: Less than half the respondents think they are ready to scale up to meet business needs for the next five years. 69% of respondents say that they have a single unified data repository and almost 40% have an enterprise-wide data governance framework. 

AI  in the organisational structure: 34% of survey respondents said they had independent centres of excellence for AI-led innovation, followed by 21% who listed business units as the drivers of AI implementation in their organisations.