By PAUL O’DONOGHUE, Senior Correspondent
ADVANCES in artificial intelligence (AI) could create more skilled compliance roles instead of replacing them, according to Dr. Shlomit Wagman.
Dr. Wagman, Chief Regulation Officer at Rapyd and former head of Israel’s Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority, said fears of AI eliminating jobs often miss the bigger picture.
“AI is great at doing simple tasks. It can replace certain tasks which are very automated and require low skills at this point at least,” she told the AML Intelligence ‘Women in FinCrime Summit 2025’ on Thursday. “[But] then you need more sophisticated people and experts.”
Dr Shlomit Wagman outlines skilled worker ‘pyramid’
Many companies rely on large teams of lower-skilled workers, overseen by a few highly skilled staff. This setup is especially common in larger financial companies and lenders, such as banks. Dr. Wagman suggested AI could reverse this trend, increasing demand for experts. “Instead of having, in the pyramid, a lot of people in the bottom, and then as you go up, less people, it’s actually the opposite way around,” she said.
With AI handling routine tasks, businesses will need more professionals to interpret its results. “You need many more highly educated and professional people to be able to analyze the output of the machines and the decisions we make,” she added.
Dr. Wagman pointed to fraud detection as an area where AI already plays a key role. The FBI and other U.S. authorities have warned that criminals use generative AI for social engineering, spear phishing, and identity fraud. As well as this, criminals have deployed AI-generated text, images, videos, and audio to deceive victims.
“The expert, they actually need to [have] more and more expertise in what they do in order to instruct the machine to do that better,” Dr. Wagman said.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article
If you would like unlimited access to AML Intelligence premium articles, newsletter delivered twice a week, access to our Global Bank Fines and Penalties database, free access to Boardroom Series events and much more, select one of our subscription options and become a subscriber!
