Recently, we highlighted the potential difficulties in creating specifications and reward functions that enable agentic AI agents to autonomously work toward a desired outcome using only appropriate means. We thought it might be informative and fun to explore the specifications we would use to deliver a college football playoff selection and tournament seeding model.

There’s an inherent difference in specifying desired outcomes to a human and an agentic AI model. Humans naturally apply ethics, compliance, risk, broader long-term goals, and subjective understanding to recognize the intent and appropriate direction to the goal. . These concepts give humans a directional “north star.” Absent this moral compass, agentic AI models can demonstrate a sophisticated level of innovation that includes brilliant, unforeseen strategies which may incorporate cheating, manipulation, lying, flattery, and deception to reach its target objective. This article discusses what agentic AI represents and the challenges of building a reward function that keeps it true to the actual intent of its programming.

BankersOnline recently discussed challenges and risks financial institutions face when a “First Amendment Auditor” attempts to record video from inside or around a branch location or office. From customer privacy to employee safety, there are many considerations in preparing your staff to address these situations. All businesses should consider this emerging threat and be prepared to respond in a way that avoids confrontation while mitigating the risk to its staff and customers.

While private lenders could offer IDR plans, the complexity in marketing, disclosing, and servicing such a loan has deterred most from doing so. The calculations related to payment inflows, delinquency, potential principal forgiveness, and charge-off rates make loss curve projections far more complicated to accurately forecast. By crafting a program that clearly understands and articulates the points noted in this article, a private lender could potentially unlock a beneficial loan program or modification strategy for their portfolio.

Most people enjoy playing games, and we don’t just play conventional classics like chess, scrabble, poker, and Monopoly – we love to apply game elements to (“gamify”) other areas of our lives. Gamification can be leveraged within every business to energize the completion of tasks that may not be incredibly engaging or exciting on their own, and we’ve provided a few examples of tasks to gamify and reward top performances in this article.

Thinking about the most recent business continuity tabletop exercises in which I’ve participated, some glaring weaknesses and themes came to mind – and that’s assuming the exercise was even scheduled (and wasn’t canceled). Consider ways to create compelling scenarios that challenge players to adapt to ever-changing circumstances, support the team’s goals (potentially to the detriment of individual players), and make difficult decisions without complete information in uncertain environments.

In its current construction, compliance training is operationally inefficient - it costs considerable time, energy, money, and focus, and it’s unclear whether employees are actually absorbing the training material and applying it to their current role. There are clear opportunities to use compliance training and drive employee development throughout an institution, and this article highlights best practices toward that end.