Data insights company S&P Global is developing internal- and external-facing generative AI tools to boost efficiencies — and it hopes to monetize the technology by offering it to customers. 

The New York-based company rolled out its gen AI-driven tool Spark Assist on April 25 internally to all employees, Chief AI Officer Bhavesh Dayalji told Bank Automation News. S&P has found that the tool can increase productivity by 20% to 60%, he said.

“It’s about elevating the work that our people are doing to be more differentiated” Dayalji said. “Some of the mundane tasks that our people are involved in today, in the future [they] won’t be as much.” 

He said Spark Assist can help employees with: 

• Code writing and testing; 

• Data analysis; 

• Marketing, through the collection of sentiment data from social media; and 

• Corporate uses like keeping up with IRS compliance. 

“We are also using Spark Assist to develop business relationships,” Dayalji said. “It helps our salespeople to extract information from documents, interviews and publicly available information.” 

Spark Assist was built in-house, Dayalji said, adding that it is plugged into major AI models in the market as a part of its open system initiative to provide a variety of responses. 

“Our Spark Assist platform allows you to select which model you want to use,” Dayalji said. “We’re using OpenAI, Meta’s Lama and Claude [Anthropic] AI models.” 

External AI tools 

S&P Global launched its S&P AI Benchmarks by Kensho tool designed to help organizations and financial services companies evaluate custom AI models, Dayalji said. 

Financial services organizations can use AI Benchmarks to understand which publicly available AI models best suit their needs, Dayalji said. 

“We were trying internally with our R&D team [to] find a way of being [able] to evaluate AI models and try [to] understand which model is the best for the use cases that we’re looking for,” Dayalji said.  

S&P decided to roll out the product for commercialization and has been working with financial institutions and businesses to understand how best to deploy and monetize it, Dayalji said. 

S&P has more than 15,000 banks across the globe using its services, according to the company’s website. 

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