mumbai the financial sector in india is driving investments into chatbots and artificial intelligence ai to augment customer service but bankers are convinced that there would not be job losses as these new tools will only complement staffwhen it comes to ai it is not upstarts but big guns of banking with resources which are driving investments state bank of india sbi is working with ibm to make use of watson an answering computer software to assist staff and employees hdfc bank has tied up with artificial intelligence firm niki funded by ratan tata and ronnie screwvala to bring in conversational banking last week yes bank partnered payjo to launch ailed digital initiatives among other things the bank is looking at ai solutions based on speech recognition the bank has also launched yes taga chatbotbased app to seamlessly engage in chat banking on five messaging platforms facebook messenger twitter skype telegram and wechat sbi is also looking at using artificial intelligence to address some of the standard requests at call centres we find that chatbots are useful for employees for instance if an employee has entered a particular screen and does not know how to proceed the software will sense inactivity and a bot will popup offering assistance said mrutyunjay mahapatra deputy md and chief information officer sbi according to nitin chugh digital banking head hdfc bank the website chatbot has seen one lakh conversations in one week with the bot concurrently running 700750 conversations chugh however points out that bots are not there to replace customer executives but to complement them and to provide customers with a richer experience in any case the routine queries are moving to the selfservice mode most of the calls now pertain to when the caller is worried about a transaction and wants to speak to a human said chughicici bank has found success in using chatbots for answering queries on remittance to india in remittances using swift we have noticed that customers are always concerned on whether the money has reached the beneficiaries banks account the queries are standard said b madhivanan chief technology and digital officer of icici bank the bank is also using artificial intelligence to replace dumb search on its website with something that is more intuitive madhivanan said we are still at level one when it comes to the stage of maturity the next level would be the equivalent of apples siri or amazons alexaaccording to ritesh pai of yes bank the future capacity addition at call centres might taper off as standard queries can get addressed by bots the advantage of using technology to answer customer queries is that there is a high degree of standardisation in responses he adds insurance companies too are catching up earlier this month hdfc life launched the first life insurance chatbot in collaboration with haptik a conversational commerce platform powered by chatbots the company said that the bot would recommend best suited plans after quizzing the user for 60 seconds