“AI technology is taking evolutionary leaps on what seems like a monthly or even weekly basis,” wrote Broadridge president Chris Perry, and it’s “changing the rules in finance and business”. In an opinion piece for Forbes, he lined out five rules to help firms navigate what he calls a “breakneck innovation” – one of which was inspired by the foresight Elvis Presley displayed with his hit song “A Little Less Conversation” in 1968.
One line in the famous song stood out to Chris Perry: “a little more action please”. This, he claimed, is the “Elvis Rule” that AI will enable in 2024. AI products will soon go beyond talking – which is what we currently see with chatbots – to “actually accomplishing tasks for users”.
“Companies will use large language models to initiate API calls to independently connect to other applications in order to complete complex workflow tasks”, he predicted. “It will be increasingly common for AI bots to perform both sides of a correspondence, writing and responding to emails, booking appointments and rescheduling meetings—all without human input,” he wrote, leading to “a great opportunity for productivity expansion in the financial services industry”.
The rest of it
The other four rules are: FOMO (fear of missing out); Productivity to the Max; Back to Basics; and the TikTok Rule. The first is the expectation that companies will move from using generative AI only in internal operations to using it in more externally facing products. The second has to do with using AI to empower employees, enabling even non-experts to use technology to accomplish tasks outside of their expertise. The “Back to Basics” rule reminds companies to remained focused on building a solid foundation despite the temptations of the shiny new tools that seem to be released every week. Finally, the TikTok rule predicts that AI will go multi-media, moving beyond text-based applications to multi-modal ones, including audio, image, and video.