To say that the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down is an understatement, made more so with each passing day. The impacts on daily lives — lockdowns, masks, the threat of grave illness, extraordinary economic dislocations and uncertainties, etc. — these are concrete and tangible to nearly everyone. But along with the many obvious changes that are taking place, a number of more subtle but equally powerful shifts are occurring that will have a profound impact on the way that AI will be viewed and used going forward by financial services companies and their customers.
As 2019 came to a close, no one was expecting predictive statistical models to dominate the collective consciousness, and yet the term "flatten the curve" has become a top global meme. Charts and graphs showing the expected progress of COVID-19 under different sets of assumptions have become front-page news. Even those who know nothing about statistics are increasingly aware that predictive models are being used to make extremely important decisions about many aspects of our lives.