Prateek Shrivastava | July 2026 | Washington DC Artificial intelligence is already producing real, measurable results in financial services, and the strongest evidence for it is more substantial than the conference circuit usually gives it credit for. The appendix of this article contains the database of case studies referenced in the text. The most credible…
Prateek Shrivastava | July 13, 2026 | Reporting from AI for Good 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland. I spent three days at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, where more than 11,000 participants from 169 countries gathered alongside the first United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the World Summit on the Information…
In less than 30 months, Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most transformative technologies on Earth. This is also true in financial services, with the potential to extend financial access, reduce costs, and improve decision-making at an unprecedented scale. But this promise is not new. Those of us who have been building digital…
This second piece takes the conversation deeper—into the operational heart of institutions that carry public trust and developmental mandates. It is about design choices. It is about accountability. And most critically, it is about context. We explore here a quiet but powerful architecture called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—not as a technological novelty, but as a foundational…
Access has scaled. Agency hasn’t. Investing in intelligent systems can address this gap while generating both financial and impact returns. Our Causes Since 2011, the share of adults with a financial account has jumped by 28 percentage points. Yet one core measure—whether a person can raise emergency funds within 30 days—has barely moved. In low- and…
On January 21, 2026, the global AI conversation gathered in Davos under the banner of the Inflection of Intelligence. At the Imagination in Action AI Summit convened by MIT CSAIL and partners, the discussions on general, societal, and planetary intelligence, the emphasis was on the scale of capability, infrastructure, and potential impact. The premise was…