Chances are, if you have a smartphone or an internet connection, you've encountered artificial intelligence.
Whether you use a chatbot as your personal assistant or have just read a few headlines about this transformative technology, you know that AI is changing many aspects of public and private life – from how we search the web and draft emails to how some apply for jobs and shop for groceries.
It’s also impacting most industries, including ours in financial services.
Across the Bank, we have implemented more than 60 AI solutions, like the TD Securities Virtual Assistant, an internal chatbot to help colleagues to answer client inquiries with increased efficiency and speed.
Our customer service agents in our North American Customer Operations (NACO) department have also begun using a chatbot to help them field customer questions quicker. We have plans to launch Knowledge Management System-powered AI chatbots across a total of seven lines of business by the end of this year.
But for some, the ubiquity of AI might feel sudden – which could lead to feelings of unease.
AI-related apprehensions remind me of the squeamishness many of us feel around tricky school subjects, like math. I experienced that fear when I was taking theoretical math in university. My thinking changed when I realized those complex concepts boiled down to relationships between data. AI is about relationships between data, too.
Generative AI (GenAI) works by predicting the next most likely word in a string of words after following a given prompt. It can draw answers from a massive library of information, for example, the breadth of the internet and a huge number of books. It can be better than us at identifying and leveraging patterns within that library.
GenAI can then respond to a prompt with text that looks remarkably human because it's analyzed billions of rows of information that has been written by people.
When you think about it that way, you can start to see AI as a human-powered library that can respond to your very specific requests by instantly finding relationships among the data it's been fed.
Once you reach that point, you can start to think: how could I use GenAI as a resource to possibly make my life easier and more efficient? That's what we're doing at the Bank, we're constantly asking, how can we use this revolutionary technology, AI, to help improve colleague and customer experiences?
A trustworthy approach to AI
However, it can't be denied that as AI continues to evolve – and evolve quickly – many are raising legitimate concerns about it, especially as it becomes so rapidly integrated into our lives.
A 2024 Harvard University paper suggests that American adults have embraced AI faster than previously groundbreaking technologies, such as personal computers or the internet. Many are now posing, and even exploring questions, about whether certain skills will become obsolete in the near future. Others still are concerned about how AI is being developed, especially given the recent high-profile incidents of AI platforms spewing misinformation and hate speech.
While AI seems to be advancing quickly, these innovations would not be possible without human ingenuity. And, even though AI tools can respond to prompts quickly (and usually accurately), they require real people to provide checks and balances.
At Layer 6, our in-house AI research and development centre, we are guided by an approach we call Trustworthy AI. It's not only a philosophy, but a team at the Bank.
A group of colleagues make up our Trustworthy AI team and they focus on the ethical development of everything we build, with a governance framework in place that includes those aforementioned checks and balances.
"Everyone who comes to our bank – no matter their gender or age, for instance – is an individual with different needs, at a different stage of their life,” said Jesse Cresswell, a Layer 6 Staff Machine Learning Scientist who leads the Trustworthy AI team.
“We need to build technology that does not disadvantage any given group, and that we do so while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of personal information that is legally required," he continued.
Looking outward
Along with our governance framework, we are engaged in the broader AI ecosystem to help our research and AI development teams work outside their own echo chambers. The external connections we developed not only help our teams stay at the front of their fields, but have helped us recruit top, early career talent from renowned AI research institutions.
The Bank is one of the founders supporting the Vector Institute, a leading independent, non-profit AI research center based at the University of Toronto. TD works with Vector to train talent and accelerate our AI use case development.
Through the Radical Ventures Fund, a third-party venture capital fund focused on AI that TD has invested in, the Bank also works with the Toronto-based AI company Cohere to test large language models, among other projects.
These Toronto-based relationships help position us to be at the forefront of the rapidly changing AI field. These relationships, and our Trustworthy Approach to AI, will help equip more of our colleagues not only with AI tools, but with an AI skillset that will help them at work, and beyond.
Because as we know, the AI revolutions isn't coming, it's here.
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