Chau, Author at CFTE

Exponential AI and Financial Services: A Free Course

Chau — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:25:55 +0000

In early 2026, Mythos sent alarm bells across central banks, regulators, and financial institutions worldwide. Not because of how it became known, but because of what it could do.

Mythos was not designed as a cybersecurity tool. It was a general purpose model, the next step up from what millions of people use daily. Yet it could autonomously find and exploit vulnerabilities across virtually every major operating system and browser, without any human guidance, at a level exceeding the best human experts.

If a general purpose model could do this as a byproduct of its broader capabilities, what does the next generation look like?

Mythos is not the story. It is the signal.

Huy Nguyen Trieu

Co-founder, CFTE
Author, The AI-fication of Jobs
Former Managing Director, Citi

Prof. Douglas Arner

Kerry Holdings Professor in Law, University of Hong Kong
Associate Director, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

Huy Nguyen Trieu and Professor Douglas Arner have spent decades working at the intersection of finance, technology, regulation, and innovation. Both believe the world is now entering a fundamentally new phase of AI. To help finance professionals understand what this shift means, and what to do about it, CFTE has made this course free.

The deeper issue

Exponential AI

Mythos points to something much larger. We have entered a third wave of AI, where systems can not only think and reason but act autonomously in the digital world. At the same time, AI is becoming ten to a hundred times more powerful and cheaper every year. What is impossible today could be possible tomorrow. Not tomorrow as a figure of speech. Tomorrow.

For financial services, this matters more than in almost any other sector. The industry is built on trust, risk management, regulation, and professional judgement. These are precisely the things exponential AI puts under pressure. Yet most firms and professionals are still responding incrementally. The sector had a decade to adapt to fintech. It has had roughly three years to move from AI to generative AI, to reasoning AI, to agentic AI. The pace will not slow down.

What the course covers

Huy opens by unpacking what Mythos revealed and why it signals something far larger. He introduces the three waves of AI, the concept of Exponential AI, and what it means for individuals and organisations to become anti-fragile in this environment.

Professor Arner then examines the implications for financial services specifically: why the sector was well positioned for the first wave, why that is no longer sufficient, and how different categories of risk, from malicious actors to infrastructure concentration to the loss of human expertise, require fundamentally different governance responses.

1.5 hours Self-paced Free

What you will learn

Key themes covered in the course

	What Mythos reveals about the third wave of AI and why it signals something much larger
	Why exponential AI makes linear planning obsolete and what a new strategic mindset looks like
	How to become a supercharged professional and why talent, not technology, is now the real differentiator
	The five categories of AI risk in financial services and why each requires a different governance response
	How institutions can move from AI-busy to AI-ready by rethinking their operating model

Start the course today

1.5 hours · Self-paced · Free

Enrol now →

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The Third Wave of AI

Chau — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:09:37 +0000

From Prediction to Cognition to Autonomy

Artificial intelligence is not a single technology. It is a shifting landscape of capabilities that has evolved through distinct phases, each unlocking new possibilities for businesses, institutions, and society. At CFTE, we frame this evolution as three waves, a progression defined not by the algorithms alone, but by the degree of autonomy AI holds in relation to human decision-making.

Understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are heading is essential for anyone navigating the future of finance and technology. Here is how we see it.

The First Wave: Predictive AI

Machine Learning | 2010s — Present

The first wave of AI was built on a simple but powerful premise: if you feed a machine enough historical data, it can learn to recognise patterns and make predictions. This is the era of machine learning — supervised models, neural networks, gradient boosting, and the statistical engines that transformed industries from the 2010s onward.

In finance, this wave gave us credit scoring, fraud detection, algorithmic trading, and demand forecasting. In technology, it powered recommendation engines, search ranking, and ad targeting. The common thread was that humans defined the problem, selected the features, and acted on the outputs. The AI optimised within tightly scoped boundaries.

Predictive AI was transformative, but narrow. Each model performed one task. It could not reason, create, or understand language. It calculated.

The Second Wave: Cognitive Assisted

Generative AI | 2020 — Present

The second wave arrived with a qualitative leap: AI that could understand and generate human language, images, and code. Powered by large language models, transformers, and foundation models fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), this wave turned AI into a thinking partner.

Rather than simply classifying inputs or forecasting outputs, cognitive assisted AI can draft documents, summarise research, write and debug code, answer complex questions, and engage in multi-turn reasoning. It augments human cognition, hence the name.

The critical distinction from the first wave is the nature of the interaction. Where predictive AI delivers a number or a label, generative AI delivers language, ideas, and creative output. But the human remains in the loop. You prompt, it responds. You review, it revises. The AI assists; it does not act independently.

This is the wave we are living through now, the era of copilots, chatbots, and AI-assisted workflows that are reshaping every knowledge profession from legal to consulting to software engineering.

The Third Wave: Agentic AI

Cognitive Autonomy + Execution | 2025 — Emerging

The third wave is the one now taking shape, and it represents the most consequential shift yet: AI that does not wait to be prompted. Agentic AI can plan, reason, use tools, and execute multi-step workflows to achieve goals with minimal human oversight.

Where the second wave gave us a brilliant assistant that responds to questions, the third wave gives us a capable colleague that pursues objectives. You set the goal and the guardrails. The AI figures out how to get there, breaking the task into steps, selecting the right tools, adapting when things go wrong, and delivering results.

This is not science fiction. We are already seeing early agentic systems in autonomous research workflows, multi-agent orchestration platforms, and self-managing software systems. The underlying technologies, tool-use frameworks, memory-augmented agents, reinforcement learning, and multi-agent architectures — are maturing rapidly.

The limitation is not capability but governance. Trust, safety, accountability, and regulatory frameworks are still catching up. The organisations that thrive in this wave will be those that learn to set the right objectives and build the right guardrails, not those that try to keep humans in every loop.

The Unifying Thread: Autonomy

Across all three waves, the defining axis is autonomy. Each wave does not replace the last, it builds on it. Agentic AI uses generative models under the hood, which in turn rely on the machine learning foundations of the first wave. What changes is how much independence AI has in the workflow:

Wave 1: AI calculates. Wave 2: AI thinks with you. Wave 3: AI acts for you.

This progression has profound implications for how organisations design roles, allocate talent, manage risk, and create value. The skills needed to supervise an AI copilot are different from the skills needed to govern an autonomous agent.

What This Means for Finance and Business

For professionals in finance and technology, the transition from wave two to wave three is the most urgent challenge on the horizon. The second wave has already reshaped how we work. The third wave will reshape what work is.

Organisations that understand this trajectory can prepare: investing in the governance frameworks, talent strategies, and technology infrastructure that agentic AI demands. Those that do not will find themselves reacting to a transformation they did not see coming.

At CFTE, we believe that education is the bridge between where AI is today and where it is going. Understanding the three waves is the first step.

About CFTE

The Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) is a global platform that builds capabilities in finance and technology. Headquartered in London, with offices in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, CFTE works with governments, regulators, and financial institutions to design frameworks, programmes, and learning systems that support transformation at scale. CFTE’s programmes have reached learners in more than 130 countries.

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From Experimentation to Capability: Why the AI Lab Supercharged Academy Matters

Chau — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:28:15 +0000

CFTE and the FCA launch the AI Lab Supercharged Academy to turn AI experimentation into capability-building and responsible innovation in finance.

Opening Remarks at the FCA, Launch of the AI Lab Supercharged Academy, 2026 – By Tram Anh Nguyen, Co-founder, CFTE:

“I am thrilled to share that CFTE – Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship is partnering with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to help turn AI experimentation into shared learning and capability across the financial services ecosystem.

The FCA has taken a leading role in engaging with AI innovation in financial services. Our role at CFTE is to support this work by translating experimentation into structured insight and practical capability. It enables firms, regulators, and stakeholders to better understand how AI is being applied in practice and to learn from these real world experiences.

The FCA AI Lab has been at the forefront of supporting firms exploring AI through initiatives such as the Supercharged Sandbox and AI Spotlight. As AI adoption accelerates, the challenge is no longer only about experimentation, but about ensuring that insights contribute to broader understanding, maturity, and responsible innovation across the sector.

Through this collaboration, the FCA and CFTE will connect live experimentation with capability-building, so that learning does not remain isolated within individual firms, but strengthens the wider financial system.

Together, we will deliver:

✓ The AI Lab Supercharged Academy — a capability-building programme for AI-led innovators
✓ The AI in Finance Observatory — bringing together real-world AI use cases and emerging insights
✓ Industry engagement and global knowledge-sharing from UK AI experimentation

Our shared objective is to strengthen AI literacy, improve the maturity of AI-enabled propositions, and support responsible innovation at scale while preserving regulatory independence.

The first session of the AI Lab Supercharged Academy has taken place at the FCA on 30 January 2026, running over the following 10 weeks.”

A Bigger Shift: AI Is Transforming Finance

The Academy is not just a programme launch. It is part of a much bigger shift:

AI is transforming finance
Experimentation is not enough
Talent, capability, and governance are now the bottleneck
Regulation must become a learning platform
The future belongs to ecosystems that build skills fast

In the 21st century economy, talent has always been a competitive edge. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, we are no longer simply talking about talent, we are now in a full speed race for AI-ready talent.

Across industries and nations, the same pattern is unfolding: some individuals and organisations are scaling their capabilities at exponential speed, while others are quietly losing ground.

What’s driving this divergence isn’t access to technology.

It is readiness to use it: strategically, structurally, and systemically.

The Shift We Identified: The AI-fication of Talents

In our report The AI-fication of Talents, we argued that AI transformation is not primarily a technology shift.

It is a workforce shift.

AI does not simply automate tasks: it reshapes roles, decision-making, accountability, and organisational culture.

The report highlighted a growing mismatch:

AI capabilities are expanding quickly
But institutional talent, governance, and readiness are not keeping pace

In other words:

AI is moving faster than the systems meant to support it.

The frontier of innovation is no longer technical feasibility.

It is human capability.

From Experimentation to Shared Learning

The FCA AI Lab has taken a globally leading role in engaging with AI innovation through initiatives such as:

Supercharged Sandbox
AI Live Testing
AI Spotlight
AI Sprint
AI Input Zone

These initiatives enable firms to experiment with AI in real world conditions while maintaining appropriate safeguards.

But as AI adoption matures, experimentation alone is not enough.

The next step is ensuring that insights do not remain isolated within individual firms.

The industry now needs:

Structured learning
Capability building
Ecosystem wide maturity

Why the Supercharged Academy Matters

The AI Lab Supercharged Academy is designed to connect live AI experimentation with practical capability development.

Its purpose is clear:

To equip AI innovators with the skills needed to move fast and not break things.

The Academy delivers:

Principles based frameworks rather than checkbox compliance
Governance and accountability embedded in innovation
Regulatory preparedness as a design feature, not an afterthought
Learning that strengthens the wider system, not just individual projects

This reflects a shift we see globally:

Regulation evolving from roadblock to platform.

Capability Is the Bottleneck of Responsible AI

As we argued in The AI-fication of Talents, responsible AI cannot be achieved through technology alone.

It requires:

Talent that understands both AI systems and financial risks
Leadership that can navigate ethical and regulatory complexity
Cultures of trust inside firms and institutions
Continuous learning as AI evolves quarter by quarter

Guardrails matter.

But mindsets matter more.

Responsible AI is not just about constraints.

It is about capability.

Building the Next Chapter of Financial Innovation

Through the FCA x CFTE collaboration, we will also deliver:

The AI in Finance Observatory, capturing real-world use cases and emerging insights
Broader industry engagement and global knowledge-sharing
Ecosystem-level learning from UK AI experimentation

Our shared objective is to strengthen AI literacy, support maturity in AI-enabled propositions, and enable innovation at scale while preserving regulatory independence.

The AI Future Will Belong to Learning Systems

AI will not wait.

Static frameworks will grow obsolete quickly.

The institutions that thrive will be those that can flex, learn, and build talent continuously.

The launch of the Supercharged Academy is therefore more than a programme.

It is a signal:

The next frontier of AI in finance is capability.
And capability must be built together.

The future of AI in financial services will not be shaped by experimentation alone, but by the capability to deploy innovation responsibly at scale.

The AI Lab Supercharged Academy reflects a shared commitment between the FCA and CFTE to build the talent, governance, and learning systems that trustworthy AI requires.

This is how innovation and resilience progress together, by design, not by chance.

First cohort of the FCA x CFTE AI Lab Supercharged Academy, signalling the start of a 10-week immersive learning journey.

Press release: https://lnkd.in/ezFaisQd

Authored by Tram Anh Nguyen
Co-founder of CFTE and chairwoman Global Women in AI, is a global leader building the systems, alliances, and platforms that ensure the AI transition delivers widespread, human-centred progress.
Whitepaper report: AI-fication of Talents Whitepaper
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tramanhnguyen9

About FCA

The FCA enables a fair and thriving financial services market for the good of consumers and the economy. Find out more about the FCA.

About CFTE

Disclaimer

Participation in any programme or initiative under this collaboration does not imply regulatory approval, endorsement, or authorisation by the Financial Conduct Authority of any firm, product, service, or innovation. Neither the FCA nor any of its staff or committees has provided an assessment of compliance with regulatory requirements. Responsibility for compliance remains with the relevant firm or participant.

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The Future Is AI-Literate. Now, Are We Ready?

Chau — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:14:55 +0000

Is this widespread adoption enough?

Are people equipped with literacy using AI correctly and effectively?

Do companies have the right AI strategy across all levels?

Why AI Literacy Is Everyone’s Business?

As the countdown begins for Future Skills Forum Asia 2025, part of the Singapore FinTech Festival’s milestone 10th edition, one theme is already demanding serious attention: the urgent need for AI Literacy.

Check out FSF 2025: https://fsf.cfte.education/

While AI tools are rapidly entering every sector, from finance and healthcare to education and government, the real transformation won’t come from the technology alone. It will come from the people who know how to use it wisely. AI literacy is emerging as one of the most essential capabilities for the coming decade, not because everyone needs to become a data scientist, but because navigating an AI-powered world requires more than technical fluency. It requires judgement, ethics, context, and critical thinking.

To be AI-literate means being able to ask the right questions of algorithms, understand how they’re built, identify where bias might emerge, and make confident decisions when machines are part of the process. These skills are no longer “nice to have” but are foundational for future-ready professionals at every level, across industries.

As we look ahead to FSF2025, where thousands of global leaders will gather to discuss the future of work, talent, and innovation, AI literacy will be a thread running through every conversation from how we prepare the next generation to how we build more inclusive and ethical digital economies. The world doesn’t just need more AI. It needs more people who understand it. And the future will belong to those who are not just using AI tools, but shaping how they are used.

Start building your AI literacy NOW!

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