Case Studies

Case Study: Financial Services

What you can achieve when experts utilize AI by Rober Baldock, MD of Clustre Solutions Brokers.

Like everyone on this planet I've been wondering how best to use AI in my work. I think I have found at least one very good way.

We have been working very closely with a former client of mine (Mike Jackson) who has spent the last couple of years developing a tool called PreEmpt that uses a combination of human and artificial intelligence to develop deep answers to key strategic questions. It's quite a remarkable tool. We used it a few weeks ago to ask it how we should grow Clustre - our business. Not only did it produce a very thorough analysis of the state of our business but it came up with some very sensible and some novel ways for us to develop our business still further. We are now progressing those recommendations. Spurred on by this experience I undertook an experiment.

I spent my first 23 years working for the firm now known as Accenture, in their Financial Services practice. One of our most successful marketing initiatives was to produce Thought Leadership Reports which would either address a key issue in banking (say the Cost/Income ratio) or a key opportunity (e.g. BankAssurance). These reports took hundreds of hours and many weeks and months to prepare as well as a fair bit of money. So I started to wonder...could I use PreEmpt to drastically reduce the time it took to produce such a report? I came up with a question and submitted it along with a lot of context to PreEmpt. The first thing PreEmpt did was to tell me that my question could be improved! So I took its suggestion and submitted my question. Five hours of compute time later, out popped my comprehensive answer. I was literally blown away by the quality and depth of the response. So, together with another former Accenture partner who was also experienced in the production of Thought Leadership pieces for the Banking industry, we took the output of PreEmpt and fashioned it into what we thought was a very decent report. In total we spent five hours preparing the report. All of this was achieved over three elapsed days.