Varo Bank is building generative AI co-pilots by tapping internal tooling and Amazon Web Services.
The $486 million digital, cloud-first bank is using AWS’ Bedrock to build generative AI applications and foundations, Viral Parikh, head of data at Varo, told Bank Automation News at Bank Transformation Summit 2024 in Charlotte, N.C.
A co-pilot is an AI assistant that allows organizations to accomplish tasks faster, according to tech provider Salesforce. San Francisco-based Varo is starting out with the following co-pilot applications:
- Improve the chatbot experience;
- Assist agents; and
- Deploy summarization.
“We want to start slowly,” Parikh said of the co-pilot initiative, noting that the priority is to invest in what “has the most impact from a business and financial point of view” for the bank.
While there is no set timeline on when the co-pilots will be ready, the bank aims to have multiple gen AI co-pilots in place in the next eight to 12 months while keeping compliance and regulatory hurdles in mind, he said.
Co-pilots in action
Varo joins other institutions in its co-pilot efforts. The following FIs have deployed them within their operations in the past year:
- The $1.9 trillion TD Bank is piloting its gen AI co-pilots to assist its software engineers and customer service representatives alike.
- The $219 billion Citizens launched Digital Butler in Q4 2023, which allows customer service representatives to record and summarize calls.
- In July, the $49 billion Frost Bank tapped LivePerson’s AI co-pilot, which provides call center agents with prompts and call summarization tools.
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