American Express Plans To Use AI To Validate Customer Transactions And Analysis Sentiment

JAKARTA - American Express (Amex), a financial services giant, plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) services to validate transactions, approve credit limits, analyze customer sentiment, and predict customer finances.

However, a recent report from VentureBeat states that Amex currently has no intention of developing its own large language model (LLM) to compete with ChatGPT from OpenAI and Bard from Google.

In the report, Luke Gebb, Senior Vice President of American Express Digital Labs, rejected the idea directly.

"Our current hypothesis is that we are more suitable for using LLM through partnerships. I don't see we made our own LLM from scratch," Gebb said, quoted by Cointelegraph.

Gebb also did not disclose which partner to work with the company - Amex did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Cointelegraph - but it should be noted that the company has been working with Microsoft to develop cloud-based AI technology in recent months.

Microsoft has big shares in the generative AI world, for providing $1 billion (Rp15 trillion) support to current industry leaders, OpenAI, in 2019.

While it remains unclear which partner will provide the current service or whether Amex will look for a new partner, Gebb said a number of activities and services that the company hopes will integrate into its future products and services.

This includes using AI to speed up transaction approval and utilizing LLM to analyze customer interaction data to analyze sentiment. This process involves processing customer feedback as a database and using machine learning to gain key insights and action points.

Gebb also told VentureBeat that Amex would use AI to "accompany card and credit limits", which is sometimes a controversial practice that relies on historical trends to try to determine whether a applicant is likely to suffer significant financial losses (or growth) and, among other things, make a decision whether the individual should be given credit limits.

The company appears to be taking a cautious approach in integrating the latest generation of AI technology into its products and services, which is in line with its general approach to fintech in recent years.

While its competitors, Mastercard and Visa, have accepted payments with cryptocurrencies, for example, Amex has been satisfied enough to slow down its business in this space by offering crypto reward cards but not allowing payments via cryptocurrencies.