Mizuho Financial Group Inc is giving all of its Japan bank employees access to Microsoft Corp’s Azure OpenAI service this week, making it one of the country’s first financial firms to adopt the potentially transformative generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The banking giant plans to allow 45,000 workers at its core lending units in the country to test out the service, said Toshitake Ushiwatari, general manager of Mizuho’s digital planning department.
Already, managers and rank-and-file employees at Japan’s third-largest bank are submitting dozens of pitches for ways to harness the technology even before the software is installed.
Photo: Bloomberg
There are many staff who are embracing ChatGPT in their private lives, Ushiwatari said in an interview.
“It’s like poking a beehive,” he said, referring to the enthusiastic response the firm’s move has sparked.
“They think it will completely reset the world, triggering disruptive innovation,” he added.
The developments at Mizuho and its peers come as Wall Street grapples with the unfolding AI revolution and its effects.
Within global banks, some have clamped down on ChatGPT for employees, even as they use AI for business purposes such as scanning wealthy client portfolios and screening for potential defaulters. Japanese financial firms, by contrast, appear to be adopting a more permissive stance internally.
Ushiwatari’s team plans to hold a so-called “ideathon” within the firm in Japan as early as next month, and is brainstorming ways to encourage employees to experiment with the technology.
The tool would be introduced to its brokerage unit in the country next month, he said.
So far, one of the ideas being floated is to use generative AI — in which AI models analyze volumes of data and use them to generate new images, texts, audio and video — as a one-stop reference point for the bank’s vast trove of internal rules, processes and other manuals.
Ushiwatari said he is well aware of the risks of generative AI, and the bank is introducing guidelines when it rolls out the technology to employees, such as information management, intellectual property and ethics.
Still, generative AI is something that would lift society and the bank cannot shy away from, Ushiwatari said.
“This is something we have to do, otherwise, we get left behind,” he said.
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