Introducing SPARK’s AI Open Beta Program

Valued SPARK Community Members,

Over the past several months, we’ve been working behind the scenes of SPARK to find useful and helpful places to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the daily flow of small business loan origination. With Saturday's release, we’re very excited to bring the power, productivity, and promise of AI to all of you.

We recognize many financial institutions are taking a cautious approach to AI – establishing formal policies, aligning compliance teams, validating back-end models, ensuring private data stays private, and modeling anticipated costs. Others are moving quickly, integrating AI at scale, and waiting for their key providers to catch up. 

The reality: AI adoption is all over the board.

While there are a variety of AI implementation strategies, we know safety and security are a top priority for everyone. Thus, we are building our enterprise AI strategies on trusted name brands that will be in the AI game for the long haul. With this approach, all of our customers – both small and large – will be positioned to instantly realize value on day 1 of usage, as well as day 1,001. 

With our upcoming release, we’re excited to announce the Open Beta of our AI-powered SPARK Narrative Assistant.

With these AI-powered capabilities in SPARK, we are seeking to demonstrate practical uses of this transformative technology and help everyone experience the value directly. In early research, we are seeing at least 2 hours of narrative creation, per transaction, crafted by the AI Narrative Assistant, done and delivered in minutes. This means the capacity and accuracy of the team picks up on Day 1 of AI usage.

Why the Open Beta? Because these AI services are new, valuable, and usage-based, we both need to better understand the value and consumption patterns involved in using the AI capabilities.  With the Open Beta, we will seed each environment with enough AI Credits to demonstrate the value of the capabilities while also building a “standard” consumption pattern based on actual loan processing. We’ll then use the data we gather during the beta to inform an ongoing AI Credit Plan for each customer.  

We’ll support multiple usage-based tiers, tailored to your individual use case and consumption levels.  We want everyone to experience the benefits of AI without having to renegotiate your existing contracts, so we’re planning to make these AI capabilities available outside of our normal subscription tiers. Each group seeking to use AI at scale will have an AI Credit Plan. More to come on AI Credits as we work through the Open Beta, but we’ll be in constant communication and measurement of AI Credits as we move forward together.

While our journey with AI is just beginning, we absolutely know we’ll continue to incorporate more and more AI into SPARK in the months and years to come.  The good news – we’ll fit the future into the usage and billing patterns we are establishing today so it will be easy to activate and benefit for years to come. 

We’re thrilled to partner with you on the practical application of AI in small business lending.

Join us for a webinar on Thursday, October 9th at 11:00 AM CT where we’ll demo these features live and walk through activation paths for starting your AI journey with us.

Chat soon,
Nick