Fred Lum
TD chief AI officer Tomi Poutanen, a co-founder of both Layer 6 and Toronto’s renowned Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, uses the example of prospective home buyers as clients whose needs his now-34-person team is trying to predict.“We don’t want to be there only on the day that they’re shopping around for the mortgage,” Mr. Poutanen said in a recent interview at Layer 6′s office at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District.
Canadian banks have been embracing AI in recent years with various goals, including cutting costs by doing some of the tasks humans used to perform and keeping pace with financial technology startups hoping to disrupt their businesses. Some uses are customer facing, such as the Bank of Montreal’s AI-powered “chatbots” to guide clients online. Royal Bank of Canada’s latest mobile app, meanwhile, uses AI to scan paper bills and pull out the necessary details to make payments simpler.
The TD-Layer 6 partnership emerged at a time when both parties were facing transitions. Founded by Mr. Poutanen, entertainment lawyer Jordan Jacobs and AI PhD Maksims Volkovs in late 2016, the AI company had been spun out from Milq, a startup that recommends personalized cultural content.
GlobeTechnology They sure need some kind of fashion. Look so unprofessional it's sad.