Why the CEO of CFS created an AI clone of himself

The head of Colonial First State has turned to AI to create a “clone” of himself to help boost his own productivity as the emerging technology continues to reshape all levels of financial services organisations.

“I tried this a year and a half ago and it didn’t really work with the tools we were using, [but we’re] using a different tool now,” Colonial First State group CEO Clive van Horen told a Financial Services Council event in Sydney on Thursday morning.

“It’s getting better and better every day. Maybe my job is gone one day, that will be a great day. It’s able to review board papers, even write my own board paper. 80 per cent of the job is done by the [AI] agent. Obviously, my job is to own it.”

Amber Auld, Microsoft Australia and New Zealand head of capital markets, insurance and banking, said there are numerous low-risk opportunities for AI integration across financial services.

She pointed to Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index – released Tuesday night – which found 58 per cent of those surveyed said their productivity has been lifted because of AI.

“One thing stood out to me is that 58 per cent of the people studied in that survey said that they can get more done now than over the past year than they could have imagined.

“It’s expanding human ingenuity,” Auld said. “For some of the faster-moving firms it’s over 80 per cent talking about, just being able to do more.”

As for how this would disrupt the advice profession, van Horen said people are already using AI for financial advice but would still need human help.

“Any of you can go onto your favourite tool and [ask] for example, ‘I’ve inherited $100,000 what should I do?’. It will give you – let’s call it personal advice – unregulated, unlicensed but it’s there,” van Horen said.

“The collision of traditional, regulated industries like ours and what’s possible, people are just going to do it anyway. Most people want to have a human in the loop. The opportunity is human plus AI.”

HUB24 director for strategic development Jason Entwistle countered that those getting financial advice aren’t interested in being served by AI.

“These are people that sought advice and not enough people can get advice, but they have it sorted and they want piece of mind – they’re not going to trust a chatbot to give them the answer,” van Horen said.

Van Horen said people’s trust in AI is going to go down, not up, as it impacts theirday to day lives.

“There’s an interesting challenge ahead of us in AI… the brand of AI is going down, not up,” van Horen said.

“There’s a big responsibility for on us as AI leaders and practitioners for how we’re going to help people adapt. We need to help find ways to re-skill people.”

The challenge for financial services organisations was balancing innovation with governance and van Horen said regulation was important for keeping the industry safe.

“It would be simplistic to say it would be easy to deploy AI, especially when you’re getting more ambitious of deploying agents which do their own thing into the business at scale because you’ve got to do it safely. We all know the risks of what can go badly wrong.”