BBVA has launched two generative AI assistants to support customer service teams in its digital banks in Italy and Germany, which have cut the average time taken to handle customer enquiries by more than 15 per cent.

The Spanish bank said its AI copilots are used by more than 260 customer service agents across the two markets, helping them answer almost 100,000 customer enquiries received each month via phone, email, and the bank's digital messaging channels.

The assistants were developed using BBVA Assistants, the bank's corporate generative AI platform. Built on BBVA's proprietary orchestration architecture, the platform combines OpenAI's large language models with the bank's own access controls, governance, and knowledge management capabilities.

Before the rollout, BBVA said agents had to search through multiple internal documents, manuals and knowledge bases to find the information needed to answer routine questions about products, services, and banking procedures.

The new assistants, developed by the teams managing BBVA's contact centres, bring this information together into a single platform. Agents submit a customer's query in natural language and the AI generates a structured response in the customer's language within seconds. The response is then reviewed and edited by the agent before being sent.

The bank said the assistants are designed to answer common questions, such as increasing a transfer limit or checking when a new bank card will arrive. They do not have access to customers' personal or sensitive information.

Where an enquiry depends on an individual's account details, products, or transactions, customer service agents continue to review the case manually using BBVA's internal systems before providing a personalised response.

During June alone, BBVA said customer service agents exchanged around 40,000 messages with the AI assistants while preparing responses to customer enquiries, which made them among the most widely used tools on the BBVA Assistants platform.

The bank has also provided dedicated training for customer service agents, teaching them how to write effective prompts, provide context, and use the AI assistants effectively to improve response quality and accelerate adoption.

"What makes this project particularly interesting is that the need came directly from the teams who interact with our customers every day,” said Elena Alfaro, head of global AI adoption at BBVA. “They identified a challenge in their daily work, and artificial intelligence enabled them to turn that idea into a solution with a tangible impact on both the business and the customer experience."

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