The AWS Financial Services Symposium has made it clear that the world of financial services is undergoing a massive shift, driven by generative artificial intelligence. The future of AI in finance has led some to feel overwhelmed, while others are nothing but excited about the road ahead.

Generative artificial intelligence has the ability to transform financial services in a way that hasn’t been seen for decades, according to Junta Nakai (pictured), vice president and global head of financial services, sustainability and cybersecurity go to market at Databricks Inc. That’s important, given studies that have shown that Millennials would rather go to the dentist than to the bank.

Databricks’ Junta Nakai talked with theCUBE about the future of generative artificial intelligence in finance.

“The experience is not very pleasant for a lot of people. I think being able to do personalization, being able to give new types of advice, that’s going to transform the way people interact with their financial service institutions going forward,” Nakai said. “I think there’s going to be massive benefits from that.”

Nakai spoke with theCUBE analyst Savannah Peterson at the AWS Financial Services Symposium, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the future of AI in finance and the challenges of technology adoption in the industry. (* Disclosure below.)

The hurdles of technology adoption in financial services

Financial services, of course, hasn’t always been the fastest-moving industry when it comes to technology adoption. Generative artificial intelligence is now all the rage, but actually adopting it means moving past the theatrics around it, according to Nakai.

“There [are] now difficult decisions that have to be made about how are we going to modernize our tech stack? How are we going to democratize data and AI across the organization? And then how are we going to actually transform?” he said.

Those are good questions, according to Nakai. That’s because it’s led to a chain of events where companies are now rethinking the decisions they need to make more upstream in the tech stack in order to be able to enable technology.

“This is what’s happening. And as a result of that at Databricks, financial services has become our single biggest vertical and one of the fastest growing verticals. And I’ve been here for five, six years,” he said. “If you asked me in 2019, ‘Is financial services going to be the largest vertical in the near future,’ I probably would’ve said no.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium:

(* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. and Databricks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Amazon Web Services, Databricks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE