OCBC Bank pioneers gen AI chatbot to enhance employee productivity
- Josephine Tan
After a successful six-month trial, OCBC Bank has made a chatbot powered by generative AI (gen AI) accessible to 30,000 employees across 19 countries.
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this chatbot scours the Internet and generates responses to text-based queries. According to Donald MacDonald, OCBC’s Head of Group Data Office, the bot, developed in collaboration with Microsoft Azure, will assist employees in the bank’s 420 branches and offices worldwide in writing, research, and ideation starting in November.
He highlighted that the 1,000 employees who participated in the trial reported completing their tasks in half the usual time, even with fact-checking, thanks to the bot’s assistance. To enhance security, information processed by OCBC ChatGPT remains hosted on the bank’s private cloud, a dedicated computing environment exclusive to OCBC.
MacDonald emphasised that the 91-year-old bank is among the first globally to deploy gen AI tools at scale, citing American bank JP Morgan as another early adopter.
Gen AI is being utilised by the bank to personalise customer interactions, recommend stock purchases, and identify fraud and suspicious transactions. “We also do things like create actionable nudges, helping our customers save time and save money,” he added.
Currently, the bank is either using or piloting four gen AI functions, namely “Wingman” which assists the bank’s coders in writing code, “Whisper” which transcribes voice calls and generates summaries for contact centres, “Buddy” which extracts information from 150,000 pages of company documents and record meetings for employees, and “Document AI” which summarises documents such as financial reports.
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With AI already making four million decisions daily for the bank in areas like risk management, customer service, and sales, MacDonald anticipates this number to reach 10 million by 2025 as gen AI assumes more responsibilities.
The bank’s 150-strong data science and engineering team, responsible for overseeing 250 AI models, has plans to assist the legal team with document management and foreign language document translation into English in the near future, reported The Straits Times.
