There are fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will take away jobs and livelihoods with machine learning and autonomous robots displacing and replacing human workers.
But could AI also be coming for your money—or all money?
The AI data center wave is already driving capital spending for the technology, equipment, real estate and infrastructure sectors.
AI’s machine models are bringing sea changes to the world of money, including banking, insurance, and financial markets.
“I can tell you firsthand that AI is everywhere in finance, and teams are only just beginning to scratch the surface with potential applications,” said Dock Treece, founder of Treece Strategy Group (a Connecticut-based consulting firm).
Treece, a finance industry veteran, already sees AI being used by banking and insurance firms for customer service and to match prospective and current clients with offerings.
Treece said more AI is coming fast to the world of money.
He’s not alone.
“AI is already automating, speeding up, and improving services and decisions in the finance sector,” said Nebojsa Savicic, co-founder of Plainly Flows (a London-based group that advises finance companies on AI strategies).
AI brings speed to financial trades, compliance reports and predictive analyses.
“However, there will be risks,” Savicic added.
He said AI-driven synthetic identity fraud — which melds real information, such as stolen Social Security numbers, with fabricated personas — “will be hard to detect, and fake images and videos will be hard to distinguish from the real thing.”
‘INSANE SPEED’And even more AI-driven changes are afoot.
“There will be even bigger changes when people start letting AI agents make financial choices and do transactions for them,” Savicic added. “Then questions about liability and consumer protection come up.”
Financial reliance on AI already has a growing foothold on Wall Street and with private equity firms. It is also extending to banks, including for compliance, and retail investors.
“Money is becoming programmable and AI is becoming the one doing the programming,” said Shawn-Marc Melo, founder and CEO of deepidv (a Toronto-based firm focused on preventing AI fraud).
“The biggest shift isn’t chatbots at banks. It’s AI agents moving money on their own. An agent books your travel, pays your suppliers, rebalances your account. Nobody clicks ‘confirm,’” Melo said. “That changes underwriting, payments and compliance at the same time.”
So, how can all this go awry?
“The biggest change we see right now is on the fraud side,” said Shlomi Beer, co-founder and CEO of ImpersonAlly, an international AI fraud protection firm. “AI has made phishing much cheaper to run and much more polished. Fake bank emails, websites and ads are now often pixel-perfect copies of the real thing.”
Beer worries about AI fraudsters bilking customers out of their money and eroding the financial system’s “trust loop.”
“The blind spot is everything that happens before a customer even logs in: fake ads, cloned sites and impersonated support channels,” Beer said. “By the time internal tools flag a behavioral anomaly, the customer has often already been compromised.”
Still, banks and other financial firms see big upsides to the expected AI wave.
“AI is growing at an insane speed not just in the financial world, but all over the place. There is so much money to be saved with automation, and banks are money,” said Russell Twilligear, head of AI research and development at BlogBuster (an artificial intelligence, search engine optimization (SEO) firm).
While workers worry about their jobs and residents are concerned about the impacts of data centers used to drive machine learning models, many businesses are moving into the AI space with its promises of productivity gains, innovations, and cost savings.
Matt Rouif, CEO and co-founder of Photoroom (a Paris-based AI photo editing platform for e-commerce customers), said more companies are well beyond considering or testing out AI models.
“The businesses moving quickest have stopped running experiments and built something their teams depend on daily,” Rouif said.
shutdown RISKS
But with great rewards come great risks.
That includes the potential for not only widespread fraud, but also nefarious actors and rogue AI machine models ransoming or shutting down banking and financial systems.
“AI could absolutely shut down banking and financial systems,” Twilligear said. “The question isn’t can AI shut down banking systems, the question is are there proper safeguards in place to stop AI from shutting this bank down.”
Rouif is concerned about companies not getting what they expect from AI vendors and about humans leaving accountability and safeguards to the machines.
“The risk I would watch is quieter than people expect,” he said. “It is not a dramatic failure, it is a team that stops checking because the system has been right often enough, so the first serious error goes out unnoticed and nobody can say when the checking stopped.”
THE FUTURE OF MONEY: Some AI advocates, including Elon Musk, have talked about machine learning and automation making money less important and changing the nature of work.
Could there also be a scenario where a rogue AI could not only take over the world of money, but try to eliminate the reliance on currency altogether?
We asked Google Gemini (Alphabet’s AI platform) if AI could decide to try to nix money to protect humans from their own greed.
“The short answer is no,” the AI model said in its response, adding that machine models do not have their own set of ethics or consciousness.
“However, looking at the trajectory of technology and economics, AI could drastically change what money means, how resources are distributed, and whether traditional wealth accumulation even matters,” Gemini AI said.
The app said that at its root money is a rationing system for the world’s resources and humans’ needs, and the real danger is AI being used to accumulate wealth.
“The immediate danger is that AI could be used by human greed to concentrate wealth even faster. If a handful of corporations or individuals own the most advanced AI models and automated labor forces, the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else could widen dramatically,” Gemini said.
Treece concurs.
“You have to remember the motivations of people building and using AI tools, and all of them want money — not for money to be worthless,” he said.