Nitin Tandon, the global chief information officer of Vanguard, says artificial intelligence is a perfect tool to address the natural imbalance between the millions of clients the investment management company serves and the just 20,000 people it employs.
“If you want to offer advice to the 50 million clients that we have today, there aren’t enough advisors in the world to do that,” says Tandon. He says that AI can improve Vanguard’s operational efficiency and create opportunities to hyper-personalize financial guidance at a massive scale, and that it could one day serve as a trusted digital advisor. “For the future, if you take this a step further, this could be a voicebot just like Alexa, where you can ask how your portfolio is doing,” adds Tandon.
Today, Vanguard, which has nearly $12 trillion in assets under management, is actively piloting various ways to infuse AI to improve the client experience. Vanguard rolled out an AI chatbot to around 2,000 employees to internally test the functionality of natural language responses to client questions, including “What’s my account balance?” and “How is my portfolio performing?” Tandon says he feels that the technology is advanced enough to handle this capability, but he wants to keep a close eye out for hallucinations, which are false or misleading outputs, and ensure the proper guardrails are in place so that the tool isn’t veering into offering financial advice.
