AI is bearing fruit at Grasshopper Bank as the technology eliminates hours of labor while its AI agents are doing the work of seasoned employees.  

The $1.5 billion digital bank has entered the next phase of its agentic AI initiative by building six virtual assistants within its IT team that cost roughly $6 per hour to operate, Chief Technology Officer Peter Chapman told FinAi News.  

Employees say that these agents are like “a very capable, five-year vet employee,” Chapman said. 

The virtual assistants mark the latest stage of the bank’s agentic AI deployment. They are designed more as full-time employees rather than task-specific helpers, although human oversight is still required, he said. 

Grasshopper plans to roll out virtual assistants to other departments, including compliance and customer service, he added. 

Establishing a clear digital identity so that AI agents know which systems and data sets to operate within is crucial to scaling assistants across the company, Chapman said. 

Not only does this help ensure auditability, security and accuracy, it also minimizes disruption when a new employee steps in, he said. 

“What happens when the manager of that virtual assistant leaves? I don’t want that virtual assistant just being scrapped and gone,” Chapman said. “I want that thing to still retain its position so the next person steps in and is able to manage it.” 

AI a performance amplifier 

Chapman said the bank also has deployed dozens of workflow-specific agents in areas including:

• Compliance;
• Underwriting;
• Marketing;
• IT; and
• Information security. 

More than half of the bank’s 150-plus employees are “power users” of its internal AI platform called Hopper, and these employees have reported saving eight to 12 hours per week, Chapman said. 

Hopper comprises Google Gemini Enterprise and a few other AI models that are “built into a chatbot interface that connects to our data sets and skills,” he said.  

Employees can obtain data reports from Hopper in roughly 25 seconds, compared to three to five days when requesting manual reports from a data team, he said.

Grasshopper’s initiatives reflect its culture centered on using AI as a performance “amplifier” rather than a job replacer, Chapman said, noting that this approach supports the bank’s steady growth without adding headcount. 

“In certain areas, we can roll out a virtual assistant managed by so-and-so in operations or wherever instead of them going out and hiring someone,” he said. 

Meanwhile, increasing adoption of Gemini Enterprise continues to power growth at Google Cloud, which reported an 82% year-over-year surge in second-quarter revenue, according to parent company Alphabet’s July 22 earnings call. 

“It’s differentiated with easy-to-use tools to build agents and automate processes, connectivity to enterprise systems, cost management and governance tools,” Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said during the call.  

Register here for the FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas. This inaugural event will include speakers from Fifth Third and Capital One as well as a fireside chat with Piermont Bank founder and Chief Executive Wendy Cai-Lee.