Is AAF fit for today? What should Trustees be considering?
Is AAF fit for today? What should Trustees be considering? AAF 01/20 reports began appearing
Let’s get ready… for the rise of AI Digital Technology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be the buzzword in pensions, and we keep hearing that it has the potential to reshape Trustee Board governance – but in what way and where can it best be focused. Currently we are exploring the use of AI for pension Trustee Board minute writing capabilities and governance support, and we recently took part in RSM’s webinar series, “The future technology of pensions: the uses of AI and maintaining cyber security”, where we contributed some practical input to the panel, so we thought this would be a good time to share our initial thoughts.
Producing the first draft of minutes would be a real help for busy pension managers and scheme secretaries. Human intervention will still be required of course, to sense check and refine the outputs, but it would be a great starting point.
What AI Products Can Help?
There are several AI products available already, and more in development which have the potential to help pension teams with their Trustee Board governance. AI can help us summarise documents, interrogate data and improve member communications and we are actively looking at where it can help us review advisers, streamline reports, etc.
But can we get some help to write our minutes? Well, there are some solutions out there, however, it’s not without its challenges, some of which include:
- Schemes can often only have access to AI solutions provided by their current governance platform, although some standalone solutions are under development.
- There are justifiably concerns about how the data is used, processed and stored which need to be explored and clarified before pension teams and Trustee Boards are comfortable.
- Developing the AI model takes time whilst it learns from corrections and there are further developments.
- Output to date has definitely shown that minute writing is an art not a science.
So whilst AI has been around for a while in pensions and there are some very interesting governance implications, it has a way to go in the quality of minute writing.
It is, however, exciting as scheme secretaries that we can work with the various models to see how this area develops, as the possibilities are great and the pace of improvements is extraordinarily fast. We could see future developments including automation of the actions from the meeting, data on the meeting to assess the effectiveness of the Board in terms of Trustee Director interaction or adviser presentations, possibly with real time updates within the meeting itself.
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