BBVA has given hundreds of its staff generative AI (GenAI) training through a new in-house competition.

440 employees from around the world were tested on their ability to interact with a large language model, carrying out tasks such as processing quantitative information, finding anomalies in financial reports, and identifying, scoring and classifying the level of satisfaction of a fictitious customer based on their comments.

At the end of each checkpoint, participants received feedback on the kinds of prompts or commands they should have entered in order to successfully complete a challenge.

The move comes after the bank launched several projects in recent months to gauge the potential of GenAI in making organisational processes more efficient and adding value for its customers.

Following the four week process, Carlos Gutiérrez, data specialist at the global talent & culture area, Joel de la Cruz, data scientist of the advanced analytics engineering team at BBVA Spain, and Hans Hidalgo, also a data scientist of client solutions at BBVA Peru, posted the highest scores by overcoming all the challenges with the fewest prompts and in the shortest time.

“Generative AI is here to stay, and it has enormous potential for businesses as they revolutionise their internal processes and embrace global development projects that will allow them to deploy their products and services simultaneously in different countries,” said Curro Maturana, global head of GenAI at BBVA. “That is why we are already training the best talent at BBVA.”

The bank said it may now apply its competition concept to the GenAI courses it will be running as part of its Data University in-house training programme.

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