BBVA puts AI in the hands of every team with OpenAI

BBVA⁠(opens in a new window) is a global financial institution supporting people and businesses across Europe, Central and South America, and the U.S.

In just 5 months, and by working closely and consistently with legal, compliance, and IT security teams to ensure safe and responsible use, BBVA has widely adopted ChatGPT Enterprise, creating thousands of custom GPTs that boost efficiency, spark creativity, and share expert knowledge across their organization of 125,000.

BBVA has long embraced technology to enhance service, from pioneering ATM deposits to award-winning mobile apps. The bank operates specific development centers for advanced analytics and AI to respond to their industry’s most complex challenges.

With ChatGPT, the bank saw potential to democratize this expertise and put AI in the hands of employees. “Normally, in a business like ours, building even a prototype requires technical resources and time,” says Elena Alfaro, Head of Global AI Adoption at BBVA. “With custom GPTs, anyone can create apps to solve unique problems—it’s very easy to start.”

In 5 months, BBVA employees created over 2,900 custom GPTs—some of which reduce project and process timelines from weeks to hours.

“ChatGPT helps us get from idea to prototype in a way that was impossible before,” says Ricardo Martín Manjón, Global Head of Data at BBVA. “Everyone from Uruguay to Mexico to Türkiye can build solutions with these capabilities simultaneously.”

Since launching ChatGPT, BBVA employees in legal, risk, marketing, talent, and finance have built custom GPTs that accelerate data analysis and content creation, freeing experts for high-value work:

• The Credit Analysis Pro GPT helps BBVA’s credit risk analysts accelerate their assessments by pulling unstructured data from a variety of courses, such as companies’ annual reports, ESG assessments, and press. Previously, the analysis of these documents was a manual, time-consuming task. The GPT automates much of this work, quickly extracting the relevant data and comparing it with peers. “By automating these tasks, we can focus more on strategic analysis and creativity—for instance, when considering how to integrate ESG factors into our risk models,” says Ignacio Sueiro, Principal Manager of BBVA’s GRM Risk Strategy.

• Sueiro also developed the Craft Opti Pro GPT to help users refine basic prompts. “This is especially helpful for our risk analysts, where precise questions and prompting lead to better outputs,” says Sueiro. “ChatGPT Enterprise provides a secure space to explore and allows us to scale solutions while continuously improving them based on user feedback.”

• The bank created the BBVA Retail Banking Legal Assistant GPT to draft answers for the 40K client questions that the legal services team receives from branch managers annually. The GPT provides faster and more accurate answers to clients, giving substantial time back to the small team of nine. “Before this GPT was created, our lawyers had to research from multiple sources and draft responses from scratch,” says Elena Chávarri, Head of Talent & Culture, Strategy & Performance at BBVA. “In the future, we plan to build one GPT per type of product: asset-side products, liability-side products, and so on.”

• Developed in Mexico to enhance customer service, the Client Experience Assistant GPT accelerates sentiment analysis by processing thousands of open-ended responses from NPS surveys, distilling key insights and recommending actionable steps. This approach helps BBVA better understand and respond to customer needs.

Led by Alfaro and her team, BBVA took a democratized approach to AI adoption, distributing 3,000 ChatGPT licenses across roles and regions and allowing employees to tailor solutions to their needs.

“Our strategy is focused on putting people at the heart of everything that we do,” Alfaro says. “We gave licenses directly to the people who are in front of the problems, because they’re the ones who know where the opportunities lie.”

A team of champions from 21 domains and regions, along with advanced users known as AI “wizards,” lead hands-on workshops, helping colleagues integrate ChatGPT into daily work and identifying valuable use cases and challenges.

To measure the initiative’s success, BBVA tracks engagement, productivity, and feedback. Employees actively participate in training and feedback surveys, and adoption data shows that 83% of ChatGPT users use it weekly for productivity and efficiency gains.

Beyond efficiency, ChatGPT has sparked creativity and teamwork. BBVA created an internal GPT Store—a growing library of around 700 GPTs that are available to all users—to enable employees to discover and enhance each other’s solutions. 

“People see a GPT someone else made, reach out, and build on it with their own ideas,” Alfaro notes. “It’s been very important to create spaces where people can collaborate and share what they are learning.”

With foundational applications already proving impactful, BBVA plans to continue scaling its use of ChatGPT, further personalizing services with conversational AI that is more responsive and interactive. 

“What’s coming next is the opportunity to deliver more personalization and more convenience to all of our customers,” says Martín Manjón. “Soon all apps will be multimodal, interacting through text, voice, and even visual elements. This kind of rich experience is incredibly exciting.”

“We really feel that this is the start of a new era of collaboration between humans and machines,” agrees Alfaro. “When I think it has only been five months since we started, it’s unbelievable.”