Ally makes AI platform available companywide
Dive Brief:
Ally is rolling out its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, Ally.ai, to its roughly 10,000 employees, the bank said Wednesday, after testing it with a smaller group of staffers over the past 18 months.
'AI will enable efficiency, AI will unleash productivity, but most importantly, it will spark creativity for our employees' as they think about customer experience, said Sathish Muthukrishnan, Ally's chief information, data and digital officer.
The Detroit-based lender envisions employees using the platform, which was built in-house, to more efficiently handle everyday tasks such as drafting emails and proofreading copy, to free up time for other projects.
Dive Insight:
As banks strive to dig deeper with AI use, a number of lenders such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and BNY, have introduced AI-powered tools or platforms with the goal of improving employee efficiency.
Since Ally's platform was rolled out in 2023, 2,200 employees in marketing, audit and technology have received training on and used the platform.
Ally.ai's first use was call center capture and summarization, which employees could accept or modify. For customer care associates, 'it made their mundane tasks easier,' Muthukrishnan said. From there, the tool has been used for content creation in marketing, and in control groups in audit and risk, he said.
'All of that has been a resounding success, which has actually given us the impetus to roll it out across the company with the conviction that everybody is going to benefit from it,' Muthukrishnan said. The bank declined to comment on how much it's invested in the platform.
Nearly 250,000 prompts have been submitted to the platform, which can integrate with other large language models and AI capabilities, the bank said. In the past three months, Ally employees have gone through a companywide training program on its use.
'The magic is not in technology, but our employees using it effectively and leveraging it to drive innovation and effectiveness in their day-to-day experiences,' Muthukrishnan said. However, 'for that to happen, we need to make sure that the organization is AI-fluent.'
He also noted Ally.ai has banking controls embedded within it, pointing to capabilities like eradicating personally identifiable information.
'It's easy to roll out the tool to all the employees and claim that, 'Oh, they have all used it,'' Muthukrishnan said. 'But how do you use it safely?'
Ally is a member of the Responsible AI Institute, reflecting the importance the bank has placed on a thoughtful approach to the technology's use, Muthukrishnan noted.
'You cannot make control an afterthought,' he said.
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