With AI having become an integral part of technology roadmaps for financial institutions, it is a given that AI can help support finance professionals to provide more insight and move further up the value chain, with more data and better predictions, enabling them to deliver more value and focus on forward-looking analysis to provide greater leadership to businesses. Extending their support to finance professionals to master AI as a tool to enable greater productivity for their organizations, SLASSCOM’s  AI Centre of Excellence recently hosted  an exclusive 3-day workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Finance Professionals on the 29th 30th and 31st of March 2022.

Providing participants a hands-on experience on building AI in the cloud, this workshop brought together three top industry practitioners to discuss the key opportunities and focus areas within AI and guide the participants on how to overcome the unique challenges faced in the financial sector by utilizing AI .

Keynote speakers for the event included Dr. Romesh Ranawana Dr.Nisha Talagala  and Dr. Varuna De Silva, each of whom are renowned industry professionals both locally and internationally.

Dr. Romesh Ranawana is the Founder and CEO of Enterprise Machine Learning and is also the Co-Founder CTO of Tengri UAV, a global provider of UAV technology and applications. Dr.Ranawana is a serial entrepreneur, an AI technologist, a programmer and software architect with more than 20 years of deep tech development experience.

Dr.Nisha Talagala, the founder of AIClub is a world-renowned computer scientist and an expert in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. She is also a leader in academia organizing top research conferences in AI and write about AI in Forbes and other publications. 

Dr. Varuna De Silva is a Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University London, who currently leads the Machine Intelligence Lab at Loughborough University, and is the module leader for Principles of Data Science, Bayesian Methods in Deep Learning, Statistical methods in Finance, and Gaming Technologies and Simulation. 

The speakers discussed on how Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that is already widely deployed in financial services, can have great potential for positive impact, if companies deploy it with sufficient diligence, prudence, and care. They then outlined how to get started with ML in finances, how to choose the basic data preparation methods, how to improve them, discover a variety of ways to prepare data and overall master how to apply ML methods to financial data forecasting and how it could be used to create a return on investment (ROI),

They also provided insights on how Artificial intelligence can be  built-in business,  the AI lifecycle used to create a return on investment (ROI) and the considerations to  look at when selecting the right tools for an organization, as well as how AI can be used to improve security measures and ensure that the business is moving in the right technology-advanced, innovative direction. 

The speakers further showcased how the decision for financial institutions (FIs) or organizations to adopt AI will be accelerated by technological advancement, increased user acceptance, and shifting regulatory frameworks, and spoke about the best practices and governance for AIs in finance which included four key aspects: traceability, explainability, real-time model monitoring, and reproducibility. The Participants will also gain a hands-on experience into how they could build their own AI models during the event.   

The main takeaway from the workshop was that over the next few years, AI will have significant influence in accounting and finance, supporting accountants and finance professionals to focus on more high-level analysis, to boost efficiency, help in risk management and assessment, fraud detection, trading, preventing cybersecurity attacks and reducing human errors saving time and money and as such should be an area that requires to be built into the business strategy of companies.