NatWest Appoints Dr Maja Pantic As Its First AI Official
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One of the leading UK banks, NatWest, recently appointed its first Chief AI Research Officer, Dr. Maja Pantic.
Pantic is currently a Professor of Affective & Behavioral Computing at Imperial College London. Before that, she was a founding research director of Samsung AI Research Center in Cambridge and AI scientific research director at Meta London.
What Is Pantic’s Role At NatWest?
With a lengthy background in the sector, Pantic possesses the experience and knowledge that NatWest is seeking.
Her role at the bank will be to develop AI use cases for multimodal AI, aimed at combating deepfake threats and threats involving Generative AI (GenAI). This will include the progressive roll-out of artificial intelligence for bank-wide simplification through the development of new tools that would improve productivity.
Commenting on the matter, NatWest Group’s CIO, Scott Marcar, stated that this is not the first time that he has argued that AI is helping NatWest with simplifying its offerings and services. He believes that AI can help the bank transform customers’ experience and become a trusted partner at a time when that matters most.
This is why Pantic’s appointment is an important and exciting milestone, as Marcar noted, highlighting that she possesses unique skills and experience that will enable the bank to adapt and meet customers’ changing needs more quickly and effectively. At the same time, her introduction to the team will complement the team’s existing capabilities.
NatWest’s AI Strategy Is Progressing Successfully
The appointment of the bank’s first chief AI research officer comes as the latest step in bringing its AI strategy to reality. Previously, the bank entered into a collaboration with one of the leading AI companies, OpenAI. Apart from that, it also rolled out its internal GenAI platform to all staff members, and it reported success in the way its virtual assistant tools, Cora+ and AskArchie+, have been operating.
NatWest further said that the GenAI functionality that Cora+ has to offer has brought a 150% improvement in customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, it reduced the number of times colleagues needed to intervene, while AskArchie+ saw similar benefits.
