BBVA Accelerates Its Artificial Intelligence Strategy With A Global Area: AI Transformation

AI is driving a transformation even more profound than digitization. The world is witnessing the start of a new age of technological abundance in which capabilities that were previously complex or inaccessible are becoming available faster, more easily and at scale. AI technologies are fueling a new disruption in which technical expertise is no longer a barrier to entry, the development of new solutions accelerates, and the ability to innovate, at a significantly lower cost, multiplies.

This transformation is being driven by a new generation of smart systems: agents. These systems are capable of automating tasks, reasoning, making decisions, interacting with people and collaborating with each other to execute end-to-end processes autonomously. Although this technology is still in the early stages, it is evolving at an extraordinary pace, and it will change how companies work and how industries operate.

This technological abundance will allow us to achieve things that were not previously possible, and it represents a major opportunity for BBVA. An opportunity to offer fully personalized and better services for our customers, both individuals and companies; to enable teams to spend more time on higher-value and more creative activities; to bring financial services to more people; to boost the bank’s growth; and to have a greater positive impact on society.

For Carlos Torres Vila, BBVA Chair “Two things have historically defined BBVA: our commitment to contributing to the progress of society and our ability to anticipate the future. And we have always done so by putting customers at the heart of everything we do. We have the opportunity to lead a new phase in the financial industry and to build, together, a better bank for our customers in the age of artificial intelligence. We have the talent, experience and vision needed to position BBVA once again at the forefront of the sector’s transformation.”

To capture the full potential of this new environment, BBVA’s organization and operating model must evolve. The goal is not merely to develop AI use cases, but to systematize and industrialize the creation, deployment and management of intelligent agents at BBVA by creating shared platforms, components and capabilities that enable teams to develop solutions more efficiently, securely and at scale across the entire organization.

This vision is the result of lessons learned while developing the agents the bank is executing in ‘The Eight’, which underlines the existence of common patterns and reusable components. In the future, agent creation will expand beyond ‘The Eight,’ to encompass all bank processes.

BBVA wants to move from building standalone solutions to operating a shared ecosystem of AI capabilities for the entire Group, laying the foundations for the transformation of its operating and creation model. In practical terms, the goal is two-fold: first, to allow teams to go from developing agents in months to doing so in weeks by leveraging common components and a shared infrastructure; and second, to establish a management model in which agents work for people, amplifying their capabilities and operating under their supervision.

To achieve this, BBVA establishes the AI Transformation area at the top level of the organization, led by Antonio Bravo (Global Head of AI Transformation). This area brings together the current Data area and the critical technological capabilities needed to industrialize the creation, deployment and management of AI agents across the organization, thereby accelerating the bank’s transformation for the benefit of its customers.