Financial services giant USAA is looking to deploy AI and gen AI throughout its operations rather than implementing it to perform specific tasks.

“We are a 103-year-old company,” Ramnik Bajaj, senior vice president and chief data and analytics officer, said during a panel at Google Next recently. “We had hundreds of AI solutions that were already in use doing things like image processing and also natural language processing, but now we are very focused on this aspect of improving our member experience through generative AI.” 

The company is giving gen AI tools to its customer relationship teams, Bajaj said. The tools, developed in partnership with Google’s Vertex AI platform, help transcribe calls and suggest action items to employees while they are answering customer queries. 

“We want to get to a point … We call it, ‘unplug the keyboard,’” Bajaj said. “So, the customer service rep doesn’t have a keyboard, the AI is listening and doing everything that needs to be done, while our customer service rep is there as a human being on the other end of the phone, empathizing, being there with our members.” 

Crypto exchange platform Coinbase is also using gen AI models throughout its operations for better efficiency, Head of Machine Learning Rajarshi Gupta said during the panel. 

“We rolled out our customer-facing chatbot in June 2024,” Bajaj said. “The model is already able to tackle 60% to 65% of all consumer queries.” 

Safe AI deployment 

 USAA is also being cautious by training its staff on AI models that don’t hallucinate, Bajaj said. 

“Trust is something we all know takes years to earn and is one click away from losing,” Rohit Bhat, managing director of financial services and capital markets for Google Cloud, said at the panel. 

To develop trustworthy AI models, Google is “grounding its AI models,” or creating guardrails around what questions an AI model can respond to and how it does it, Bhat said. 

Agentic AI is great when it comes to grounded AI models, Coinbase’s Gupta said. “You can really limit the topics that you want to talk about.”  

“Customers can ask to compare Messi and Ronaldo,” Coinbase’s Gupta said. “But the model should say that this is out of domain and ignore it.”