A Look Back: The 2023 AI Forecast for Banking

Microsoft's financial services data chief forecast in 2023 how banks would use generative AI.

Charles Morris now leads agentic enterprise strategy at Truist, and his early calls are worth revisiting.

In February 2023, barely two months after ChatGPT reached the public, Jim Marous asked Charles Morris, then Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft, where generative AI was headed. Morris admitted he had never lived through an inflection point like it, then got specific. He described AI as a copilot to a human pilot who stays responsible for every output, speeding up first drafts, summaries of long documents and search across large content libraries. For compliance and documentation-heavy work in banking, he said, the early value was simply spending less time reading what nobody needed to read.

He pointed to CarMax, which used OpenAI models to summarize customer reviews for every car it sells and cut work it estimated would take years down to a few months, with its own team approving the results. He said the real breakthrough would come from pairing language models with knowledge systems that hold verified facts, and called a professional human in the loop the strongest safeguard against errors reaching customers. That pairing, now widely known as retrieval-augmented generation, became a common pattern for enterprise AI.

On jobs, Morris argued generative AI would show which parts of knowledge work are repetitive and which depend on creativity and people, changing roles and creating new kinds of work. This is the first Flashback Friday, a replay of one of our most-viewed conversations tested against what has happened since. Morris has since become SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist. Listen for which of his calls held up, and how far your own bank or credit union has moved since 2023.

About the guest: Charles Morris was Chief Data Scientist for Financial Services at Microsoft when this conversation was recorded in February 2023. He is now SVP of Agentic Enterprise Strategy at Truist.