In a pioneering move, OCBC Bank has emerged as the first local bank to wholeheartedly embrace Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) by deploying a chatbot powered by this transformative technology to serve its 30,000 employees spanning 19 countries.

Following a successful six-month trial, OCBC Bank’s Head of Group Data Office, Donald MacDonald, proudly unveiled OCBC ChatGPT on Tuesday. This Gen AI chatbot, akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has the ability to scour the web and provide answers in response to text queries.

Crafted in collaboration with Microsoft Azure, OCBC ChatGPT is all set to assist employees at the bank’s 420 branches and global offices, commencing in November. According to Donald MacDonald, the 1,000 employees who participated in the trial have reported that they were able to complete their tasks in half the time compared to traditional methods, even inclusive of fact-checking.

To ensure data security, information processed by OCBC ChatGPT is retained within the confines of the bank’s private cloud, a dedicated computing environment exclusively for OCBC’s use.

Donald MacDonald, the bank’s innovation lead, noted that OCBC is one of the earliest adopters in the world to embrace Gen AI tools on such a grand scale. He cited JP Morgan as another early adopter in this transformative journey. OCBC harnesses Gen AI for a multitude of tasks, including personalizing customer interactions, offering stock recommendations, and detecting fraudulent or suspicious transactions. Furthermore, it aids in generating actionable nudges to assist customers in optimizing their financial decisions.

For instance, customers may receive prompts like, “I noticed you have $30,000 idling in your current account. Would you like to explore ways to make it work for you, such as moving it to a high-yield savings account?” or “I see you’re subscribed to both Apple Music and Spotify. Do you really need both?”

Currently, OCBC Bank is either utilizing or piloting four Gen AI functions, broadly categorized as follows:

• Wingman: Assisting the bank’s coding team in writing code.
• Whisper: Transcribing voice calls and summarizing them for the contact centers.
• Buddy: Extracting data from a vast repository of 150,000 pages of company documents and recording meetings for the staff.
• Document AI: Summarizing documents such as financial reports.

AI, including Gen AI, is already making more than four million decisions daily in areas like risk management, customer service, and sales at OCBC Bank. Donald MacDonald anticipates that this figure will surge to 10 million by 2025, as Gen AI takes on a broader spectrum of functions.

The bank’s data science and engineering team, comprising 150 members overseeing 250 AI models, is now gearing up to assist the legal team in document management and translating foreign-language documents into English. This significant step underscores OCBC Bank’s unyielding commitment to harnessing the power of Gen AI to achieve groundbreaking advancements.