BBVA ranks first among eurozone banks for its AI strategy, according to Evident
BBVA is the bank with the most mature artificial intelligence strategy in Spain and the eurozone, according to the international Evident AI Index. The study recognises the bank’s progress in embedding AI across its business and also places it at the global forefront of developing AI-skilled talent.
The Evident AI Index assesses the AI maturity of 50 of the largest banks across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, based on publicly available data. The study evaluates banks’ capabilities across four main areas: talent, innovation, leadership and transparency. This year, Evident has also introduced new criteria to measure the deployment, adoption, use and impact of AI tools and use cases, as well as return on investment. Under this methodology, BBVA ranks first among eurozone banks and third among all European banks.
Among its strengths, Evident particularly highlights the development of specialised AI talent, an area in which BBVA ranks among the global leaders. The bank has extended access to generative AI tools across the entire organisation, alongside training and upskilling programmes designed to build the new capabilities required by this technology. Seventy-five percent of employees use generative AI on a recurring basis, saving an average of around 2.4 hours per week on repetitive, lower-value tasks.
The bank also stands out for ranking fourth in leadership, a category in which the index considers factors such as senior management involvement and the reported results of artificial intelligence initiatives. One of the most recent milestones in this area has been the creation of AI Transformation, a new global unit designed to industrialise the development and deployment of AI agents, enabling the technology to be embedded across the bank’s processes, products and services in a scalable way.
“We want to build a bank where people and AI agents work together and turn all this new capacity into greater value for our customers. Being among the pioneers in adopting this technology gives us a competitive advantage that we want to leverage to move faster and continue to differentiate ourselves,” said Antonio Bravo, Global Head of AI Transformation at BBVA.
The industrialisation of AI is one of the main shifts Evident is seeing across banking in 2026. The capabilities of the banks assessed in its ranking advanced almost three times faster over the past year than during the previous three years, as AI moves from experimentation to deployment at scale across business processes.
According to Evident, the differentiating factor increasingly lies not in access to AI models, but in the capabilities built around them to bring them into production at scale. Data availability, the right infrastructure, and robust governance and controls are key to deploying agentic tools faster and more securely. At the same time, the most advanced banks continue to bring in specialised talent and reinvest productivity gains in serving more customers, launching new products and developing the next generation of AI solutions.
AI across the entire value chain
BBVA’s strategy has focused precisely on industrialising AI in order to scale AI solutions across the bank. To achieve this, it is developing a common and secure technology environment that will enable solutions to be built, deployed and managed faster, embed control and governance by design, and preserve technological independence so that the most suitable solutions can be used in each case, supported by partnerships with companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and AWS.
Among the advances the bank is bringing to its different business areas, AI is already helping bankers and relationship managers gain a deeper understanding of their corporate clients and provide more personalised advice; streamlining risk analysis, always under the supervision of professionals; and it is accelerating software development through a model in which people and agents collaborate throughout the entire lifecycle, already delivering productivity improvements of close to 28%.
The bank is also evolving its Blue chatbot into a personal financial assistant capable of understanding each customer’s context and helping them manage their finances through natural conversation.
These cases represent just a sample of the AI initiatives BBVA is deploying across its different businesses and functions.