Ally Financial and Brex rolled out AI-driven virtual assistants this week. Ally debuted a customer representative assistant to help service team members aid clients more efficiently while Brex’s virtual assistant aims to help employees of commercial clients file and manage expense reports. 

In the United States, more than 100 million consumers will use generative AI features just two years following the launch of ChatGPT, Tiffani Montez, principal analyst at think tank Insider Intelligence, said at the Finovate Fall 2023 event last week.

“Gen AI will be at the top of many financial services firms’ agenda in the coming years,” Montez said. “For financial services, we believe the most profound impact will happen in areas like personalized marketing and experiences, process automation, customer support and fraud defense in payments.”  

Ally’s internal-facing AI platform 

The $197 billion Ally launched its Ally.ai platform in beta testing in June for customer support representatives, Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data and digital officer, told Bank Automation News. The platform helps transcribe client conversations in real time, summarizes conversations and flags essential talking points to save customer support reps time, he added. 

Ally.ai helps field between 30,000 and 60,000 calls each week and has an accuracy rate of close to 85%, Muthukrishnan said. Created in-house by Ally, the technology is aimed at protecting consumer data, according to Muthukrishnan. 

When a consumer is talking to a bank, they are sharing personally identifiable information (PII) and “one of our principles is to eliminate the PII,” Muthukrishnan said.  

Ally.ai is able to identify a customer’s account number, date of birth, Social Security number, password and more, he said, and is then able to strip that information out of the summarized text automatically. 

Representatives can give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to Ally.ai’s summary and performance to teach the generative AI model if it is working correctly, Muthukrishnan said. 

The bank’s launch this week of Ally.ai follows its 2015 launch of customer-facing chatbot Ally Assist, and it is exploring adding generative AI capabilities to Ally Assist in the future, Muthukrishnan said. 

Brex looks to generative AI 

Similarly, Brex on Tuesday launched AI virtual assistant Brex Assistant. The bot is designed to streamline expense report filing by corporate clients.  

The San Francisco-based digital bank’s virtual assistant can flag expenses that fall outside corporate policies, automate manual tasks and address transactions that require compliance review or action, Michael Tannenbaum, chief operating officer of Brex, told BAN.

Brex Assistant uses generative AI to populate documents, and users can ask the bot about company spend limits as well as track expenses like travel and meals, Tannenbaum said.  

For example, Brex Assistant uses a large language model to determine the best receipt to add to a meal expense based on expense information and policy provided by the organization, Tannenbaum said. 

Brex’s virtual assistant was built in-house by “leveraging OpenAI’s GPT model,” Tannenbaum said. The company also formed a team of machine learning specialists that has been deeply involved in generative AI development.  

While in beta testing for four months, the virtual assistant helped its initial users save “300 hours per month in employee expense compliance effort,” Tannenbaum said.  

Last month, Brex also rolled out an AI-driven accounts payable feature to help business clients manage their budgets. 

Many other financial institutions are developing chatbots with generative AI capabilities to increase employee efficiency and improve customer experience. Norwegian bank, DNB is exploring generative AI capabilities for its customer representative chatbot Juno to improve employee efficiency.

Customer-facing chatbots by other financial institutions