Make way for the robot wealth manager, says UBS (UPDATED)

Among AI applications being tested is a tool designed to read facial expressions

Financial services giant UBS has announced that it is running artificial intelligence (AI) trial programmes in its wealth management and investment arms.

Among AI applications being tested are tools designed to read facial expressions and uncover clients' unconscious biases towards or against certain types of investment.

The aim is to help the company's cash-rich, but time-poor clientele to ask the right questions about their decisions, says UBS.

The move comes as little surprise. The financial services market is in the vanguard of automation, AI, machine learning, and robotics, at a time when many customers prefer app-based mobile banking to online or bricks-and-mortar alternatives.

Several international banks plan mass software automation, including HSBC, and Bank of America's investment arm, Merrill Edge.

Earlier this year, RBS announced that it may replace hundreds of face-to-face customer service staff with automated services, which it claims will free up its remaining human agents to be expert advisers.

Those advisers will only be available to its wealthiest clients, effectively making face-to-face human service into a luxury item for those that can afford it.

In this context the UBS move is unusual: an application designed to maximise the financial return from, and to, its richest customers, rather than to cut the cost of service provision to its poorest ones (the standard application of automation).

Fraud detection is another area ripe for AI applications, with companies such as Ravelin deploying machine learning capabilities to identify online payment fraud and other pattern-based behaviours.

Automation, AI, and robotics are spreading fast into other sectors, too - not least into marketing and CRM, with the much-trailed launch of Salesforce.com's Einstein AI product at its Dreamforce event next month.

Ai applications are also being used by local authorities, such as Oxfordshire County Council, in environmental planning and traffic management programmes.

In the related field of hard and soft robotics, Royal Dutch Shell today announced that it is trialling a semi-autonomous safety monitoring 'Sensabot' at a facility in Kazakhstan - the first such robot to be approved within the oil and energy sector.

IBM and Aldebaran Robotics (now majority owned by Japan's SoftBank) have been trialling a robotic concierge service, using IBM's Watson service in the cloud, via industry-specific datasets provided by 'cognitive travel agent' WayBlazer.

It stands to reason that sector-specific big data services of this type will become a major growth market over the next five to 10 years, as the enterprise application of AI and automation spreads.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg and Associated Press are pursuing automation in the production of journalism and other editorial products and services, based on press releases and trending topics.

Last week, a UK government-backed startup, PingGo, announced that its mission is to automate PR, giving rise to the real possibility that press releases may soon be produced by robots for other robots to read and disseminate as machine-readable news.

With more and more jobs now reliant on repetitive behaviours, schedules, timesheets, regulations, and software, many human roles are already little more than algorithms.

As Dr Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute observed earlier this year, if you can describe your job then it can - and will - be automated.