WORK
The Citibank Expert System
Sawyer's 1984 AI system for Citibank — the first AI application deployed by a major money-center bank — which used natural language processing and rule-based inference to assist international banking decisions, and whose limitations led Sawyer to leave technology for creativity research.
The Citibank expert system was Sawyer's 1984 AI application — the first AI system deployed by a major money-center bank. Using natural language processing and rule-based inference, it assisted in international banking decisions with a reliability that human operators could not match within its specific domain. The system represented the state of the art in symbolic AI applications of its era and demonstrated the genuine capabilities of expert systems when applied to well-defined problem domains. Its limitations — the decomposition of complex tasks into predetermined components, the operation by fixed logic, the absence of anything resembling emergence — were what led Sawyer to leave technology in the late 1980s for the study of human creativity. Forty years later, his framework for understanding what the expert system lacked turns out to be precisely the framework needed for analyzing what large language models provide.
