Academics have been assessing the impact of AI on finance industry
Everyone is raving about how AI tools are helping them do more, faster. But while their speed is not in question, accuracy is a concern – and that can be costly in financial matters.
Academics at two universities in the US have analyzed more than 10,000 responses to financial exam questions from large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard and found that AI is not likely to replace human advisors any time soon.
But the WSU/Clemson University study asked the AI tools used to give the reasons behind the answers and compared the responses with those from human advisors. While they found that two versions of ChatGPT performed the best (particularly 4.0, a paid version), there was inaccuracy where topics were more advanced.
The AI responses were best for questions around securities transaction reviews and monitoring market trends, but it struggled with areas such as client insurance coverage or tax status.
“It’s far too early to be worried about ChatGPT taking finance jobs completely,” said study author DJ Fairhurst of WSU’s Carson College of Business. “For broad concepts where there have been good explanations on the internet for a long time, ChatGPT can do a very good job at synthesizing those concepts. If it’s a specific, idiosyncratic issue, it’s really going to struggle.”
The research was published in the Financial Analysts Journal and while some jobs are unlikely to be impacted in the near term, Fairhurst and his fellow researchers noted that junior analysts and similar roles could be at risk because the tasks they are performing may be adequately achieved with AI.
