Credit risk organizations are already adopting gen AI technologies. How can they deploy them safely and at scale?
Some technologies are so compelling that they quickly take on a life of their own. Generative AI (gen AI) made the leap from the laboratory to the mainstream in late 2022, when Open AI launched a public beta of its ChatGPT service. Within two months, it had more than 100 million users,1 making it the fastest-growing product in human history.
By the first quarter of 2023, big technology companies were integrating gen AI capabilities into their own products and offering programmatic access to generative models for business customers. A year on, gen AI is making its mark in multiple industries, including those that have traditionally taken a relatively conservative approach to the adoption of emerging technologies—credit risk, for example.
McKinsey recently surveyed senior credit risk executives from 24 financial institutions, including nine of the top ten US banks. We asked these executives about their organizations’ adoption of gen AI, its current use cases, their future plans for it, and the challenges they expected.
Twenty percent of the respondents have already implemented at least one gen AI use case in their organizations, and a further 60 percent expect to do so within a year (Exhibit 1). Even the most cautious of these executives believe that gen AI will be part of their companies’ credit risk processes within two years.
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