BBVA expands its agreement with OpenAI to 11,000 ChatGPT licences for the bank’s employees
The bank has expanded its partnership with the tech giant from 3,300 to 11,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licences, as part of its plan to extend generative AI capabilities across the entire organisation. Employees report that automating routine tasks with this tool allows them to save an average of nearly three hours of work per week, which they can then dedicate to strategic tasks. More than 80% of licensed users use it daily. BBVA offers training, has created a community to share best practices, and encourages internal innovation through idea ‘hackathons’.
In May 2024, BBVA entered into a partnership with OpenAI and provided its employees with 3,300 ChatGPT Enterprise licences—the business version of ChatGPT, which offers the highest level of security and privacy—to explore its potential to accelerate processes and stimulate internal innovation. Just one year later, the Group has nearly quadrupled the agreement to 11,000 licences, having assessed the positive impact this generative AI is having on team productivity.
According to data from the bank’s Global AI Adoption department, employees using ChatGPT to automate tasks report saving an average of 2.8 hours per week, freeing up more time for higher-value, strategic tasks. Notably, 83% of licensed users use ChatGPT at least once a day, and over 3,000 assistants have been created—specialised bots designed for specific tasks, ranging from translations, document summaries, and report-writing to more sophisticated uses such as assisting with coding, analysing financial information to answer legal questions raised by customers, or boosting visibility for marketing campaigns.“The tool has a user recommendation score not far off the maximum, reflecting the value it has delivered to our employees in just one year,” remarks Elena Alfaro, Global Head of AI Adoption at BBVA. “The expansion of our licences is a product of heavy in-house demand, as many business areas in all countries have expressed an interest in integrating generative AI capabilities into their teams.”
According to Antonio Bravo, BBVA’s Global Head of Data: “At BBVA, we’ve entered a new phase where we’re amplifying human talent with the capabilities of language models. We believe these tools can make us more productive and reshape the way we all work at BBVA. We are now learning how to integrate them into our day-to-day work responsibly and safely.”
Aside from mainstreaming the licences, BBVA offers training to ensure employees use the tool in line with data security and confidentiality standards. In parallel, it has set up a practice community with regular meet-ups and online forums where employees share updates, lessons learned, and access to assistants and tools that could be useful for other departments. A large internal library known as the ‘GPT Store’ helps users locate the 1,000 assistants considered relevant for the entire organisation and are available to all users.
The bank is also actively encouraging its teams to come up with innovative applications for ChatGPT. In early 2025, it organized the first internal BBVA Bot Talent hackathon in Mexico, which received over 170 ideas. The three winning projects—set to be developed and rolled out across the Group—proposed solutions to optimize and personalize commercial customer service, speed up the loan and credit underwriting process for SMEs, and spot fraud attempts via email or SMS by automatically analyzing messages.