Amex to Harness AI for Transactions, Customer Analysis

American Express (Amex) plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) services to validate transactions, approve credit lines, analyze customer sentiment, and forecast customer finances.

Despite these ambitions, a recent report from VentureBeat suggests that Amex has no plans to develop its large language model (LLM) to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Luke Gebb, senior vice president of American Express Digital Labs, dismissed the notion outright:

“Our hypothesis at the moment is that we would be better suited using LLMs through partnerships. I don’t see us spinning up our own LLM from scratch.”

Gebb did not disclose which partners the company intends to work with.

Notably, the company has collaborated with Microsoft to develop cloud-based AI technologies over the past few months.

Microsoft has the lion’s share of the generative AI industry, having invested $1 billion in current industry leader OpenAI in 2019.

While it is unknown which current partners will provide services or whether Amex will seek out new partnerships, Gebb provided a laundry list of activities and services the company hopes to incorporate.

These include using AI to expedite transaction approval and leveraging LLMs to parse customer interaction data to analyze sentiment.

This process involves treating customer feedback as a database and utilizing machine learning to extract actionable insights.

Gebb also told VentureBeat that Amex would use AI for “approving cards and lines of credit,” a controversial practice that uses historical trends to determine whether an applicant is likely to experience significant financial loss (or growth) and, among other things, whether that individual should be extended a line of credit.

The company appears to be taking a cautious approach to incorporating the latest generation of AI technologies into its products and services, consistent with its general policy toward fintech over the past few years.

While competitors Mastercard and Visa have embraced cryptocurrency payments, Amex has been content to move quickly by offering a crypto rewards card but not accepting cryptocurrency payments.