The Danish bank is applying IBM's Predictive Insights tool at its Enterprise Command Centre to keep one step ahead of IT incidents and thereby avoid a breakdown in customer service.

The system is currently being calibrated in an ongoing iterative process by the bank's internal IT team to recognise false positives and improve its predictive capabilities.

Ona Juodkiene, co-head of IT operations at Danske Bank, says: "It takes time and talented IT professionals to tailor and adjust and integrate these systems into the organisation’s IT environment. But when you invest in this, it makes it possible to create a culture across the organisation. Already now, we see that some employees, who might have been a little sceptical initially, have had what we call an AI moment, where they really see the value for both the customers and themselves in their daily work.”

She says the bank wants to be a first mover in applying artificial intelligence across its operations, The next step will entail the introduction of a virtual agent in the shape of IBM Watson's chatbot to address internal user queries as a supplement to human help at the Group IT service desk.

"It is important for us to adopt this technology relatively early in time, because it allows us to be a first mover when it comes to achieving cognitive technology expertise in the organisation," she says. "We could also chose to say that we would wait a little bit until artificial intelligence expertise is more widely available and for the technology to mature. This might be less time consuming in relation to a specific task, but it would entail a huge risk that we as a company might not be able to catch up with the early adopters."

Finextra’s NextGen Banking London 2019 conference on 16 May will bring together practitioners from across the financial services industry to explore what the AI revolution means for banks - and what financial institutions need to do in the short, medium and longer terms to benefit from AI, and ensure their customers do so as well.