To manage the flood of generative AI ideas, execs need to prioritize projects based on ROI and consider building tools in-house.

2023 is all about GenAI.  

“I don’t think I’ve had a partner or vendor meeting this year where I wasn’t pitched a generative AI play,” Rocket Mortgage CIO Brian Woodring told The Wall Street Journal. In some cases, features seem tacked on just to take advantage of the hype, he added, without compelling reasons why GenAI is the right tool for the job.  

He’s also been inundated with vendors selling products that Rocket Mortgage realized it could “confidently and more cheaply build in-house,” like a tool that analyzes data from phone calls, he said.  

To avoid GenAI overwhelm without missing out on the potential benefits, FinServs should ruthlessly prioritize projects, build light-weight experiments that allow them to fail fast, and carefully track ROI.  

For example, JPMorgan is using GenAI to analyze emails for signs of fraud, because it has become such a prevalent type of attack lately, while Goldman Sachs is letting engineers use it to write code, because it calculated that “superhumanizing” high-salaried developers gives it a high ROI yield.