The world of retirement fund servicing is undergoing a significant transformation, thanks to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants. Fund secretaries and employee benefits consultants to retirement funds can now leverage AI to streamline client servicing, saving both time and resources.
What does using AI cost?*
The cost of using AI assistants is a significant advantage. Creating a set of minutes for a two hour meeting can cost anywhere between R3 to R6, including:
This means that spending less than R10 can save you 8 to 16 hours or more of manual labour.
Moreover, AI assistants can perform tasks in seconds, freeing up staff to focus on more critical and high value tasks. This not only improves productivity but also reduces the risk of human error and improves staff morale.
Let’s look a little deeper into the “less than R10” costs.
Examples of estimated costs:
Checking the grammar of a half page A4 email: 2c
Writing a one page A4 business case on a specific topic: 4c
Writing and merging three articles on a topic into one A4 article: 12c
The cost depends on whether you use AI through an existing tool (such as your board packs creation tool) or contract directly with AI developers, like OpenAI or Meta.
Let’s look at the different scenarios:
A standard user may pay $20 a month to interact directly with ChatGPT4, though this has security concerns.
Interaction with Llama 3 is available for FREE via WhatsApp, but this also raises security issues.
Using AI via an existing tool often involves an API which is secure, and you may only need to pay for the tokens** used.
* All costs quoted are estimates.
** A token refers to a small unit of text, such as a word or phrase, that is used as an input or output by a language model or other AI application. So “A Dog” will be two tokens. “Hippopotamus” will be one token.
Uses for EB consultants and fund secretaries
Give AI your video recording from Teams or Zoom, then hand over your agenda and voilà, it will convert the video to audio recordings, transcribe those and split them into your minute items. It will write the minutes in reported speech and much more—all in seconds. AI can also perform a myriad of other tasks, such as listing the duties of a chairperson, explaining conflicts of interest pertaining to retirement fund boards, explaining net replacement ratios to new trustees, replacing references from “chair” or “chairperson” to “chairman”, performing calculations and so much more.
How secure is it?
Security concerns are a crucial consideration when using AI assistants. Allowing staff to interact directly with ChatGPT or other AI models can pose risks to data privacy and security. Instead, using an API (Application Programming Interface) of ChatGPT via third party software is a much more secure approach.
When using the ChatGPT API via third party software to transcribe an audio recording into text, the audio file itself is not sent to OpenAI’s servers. Instead, the API employs client side processing to manage the transcription, ensuring that the audio file remains on your software’s servers. Only small, encrypted chunks of the audio, which are essentially gibberish and not the actual recording, are sent to the ChatGPT API for processing.
This approach ensures that data privacy and security are maintained, and secretaries to retirement funds can leverage AI assistants using a tool that interacts with AI via an API with confidence.
Understanding how to interact effectively with AI is essential, especially considering the security protocols discussed.
How do you speak to AI?
AI assistants understand natural language, so you can communicate with them in the same way you would with a human. Here are some tips to get you started:
Talking to AI is as easy as:
“Change all references of Brandt to Brand in my minutes.”
“Don’t use names in my minutes, rather use passive voice.”
“Write this more professionally.”
“Make a summary of this discussion.”
”List the 5 best practices for communicating difficult concepts to members of a retirement fund.”
Using AI assistants is a breeze, and with client side processing via a current tool, such as your board pack creation tool, you can ensure data privacy and security. Remember, AI assistants are designed to assist and augment human capabilities, not replace them. As noted by Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor: “AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI”.