BBVA and OpenAI: An AI Revolution at the Heart of Global Banking

BBVA and OpenAI: A Strategic Alliance for the Future of Banking

BBVA, a financial institution founded in 1857, is redefining the banking sector by placing artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of its operations through a strategic collaboration with OpenAI. This initiative aims to transform customer experience, internal operations, and the daily lives of employees.

BBVA, which has been a pioneer in digital and mobile banking over the past decade, is now entering a new phase of transformation by integrating AI into all aspects of its activities. This transformation is facilitated by a strategic collaboration with OpenAI, aimed at embedding AI into customer experiences, operations, software development, and the daily work of employees. This collaboration marks a new level of partnership between a global financial institution and OpenAI, with teams from both companies working together on common priorities and long-term transformation initiatives.

A Comprehensive Transformation of Banking

By the end of 2025, this collaboration has evolved into a broader strategic alliance centered around "The Eight," BBVA's AI transformation roadmap designed to reshape banking from end to end, covering customer experience, commercial banking, risk, operations, software development, and employee productivity. Rather than treating AI as a standalone technological initiative, BBVA is rethinking how banking operates at all levels of the organization: how customers interact with financial services, how employees make decisions, how risk is analyzed, and how operations are executed at scale.

Carlos Torres Vila, president of BBVA, stated: "Our alliance with OpenAI accelerates the native integration of artificial intelligence into banking to create a smarter, more proactive, and fully personalized banking experience that anticipates the needs of each customer." The initiative encompasses all levels of the bank: from AI-powered financial assistants capable of anticipating customer needs, to tools that help bankers and risk analysts make faster and better-informed decisions, as well as systems that automate operations and accelerate software development within the organization.

Through this collaboration, OpenAI is working closely with BBVA teams in engineering, research, product development, and operations to help develop and deploy these AI capabilities securely within a global banking organization.

From Enterprise Adoption to Strategic Transformation

The relationship between BBVA and OpenAI began in 2024 with an initial deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to 3,000 employees across several countries and business areas. As adoption accelerated organically, BBVA expanded access within the organization. Today, over 100,000 employees worldwide are using ChatGPT Enterprise, making BBVA one of the largest adopters of generative AI in the financial sector.

Teams from the legal, risk, engineering, operations, finance, marketing, and customer service departments have integrated ChatGPT into their daily workflows. The deployment has demonstrated how generative AI can be scaled securely within a highly regulated organization while having a measurable operational impact across the enterprise.

For a highly regulated global bank, scaling AI required more than just deploying licenses. BBVA built its AI adoption strategy around three fundamental pillars: trust, governance, and structured learning. From the outset, BBVA aligned security, legal, compliance, and technology teams to ensure that employees had access to trusted AI tools within clear governance frameworks.

Instead of allowing unauthorized experimentation with consumer AI tools, the bank chose to provide employees with secure access to enterprise-level tools and formal training programs.

To support large-scale adoption, BBVA created a structured training framework that includes a network of AI champions across the organization, as well as advanced users known internally as "AI wizards." These teams facilitate hands-on workshops, help their colleagues integrate ChatGPT into their daily workflows, and identify valuable use cases within the organization.

Leadership engagement has become a major driver for adoption. BBVA provided specific training to 250 leaders, including the CEO and the president, and today, members of the executive committee are among the most active users of ChatGPT in the company.

Elena Alfaro, head of global AI adoption at BBVA, stated: "We view our investment in ChatGPT as an investment in our employees. AI amplifies our potential and helps us be more efficient and creative." Once employees began to see practical value in their daily work, adoption spread organically throughout the enterprise.

Empowering Every Department with Expert Knowledge

As adoption expanded, BBVA employees began creating custom GPTs tailored to specialized workflows in legal, risk, customer service, finance, and marketing. To date, employees have created over 20,000 GPTs within the organization, with around 4,000 being frequently used by teams worldwide.

In the credit risk domain, BBVA developed Credit Analysis Pro GPT, which accelerates assessments by extracting and analyzing unstructured data from annual reports, ESG disclosures, and media coverage — work that was previously manual and time-consuming. By automating these tasks, analysts can focus more on strategic analysis and higher-value work, including how ESG factors are integrated into risk models.

In legal services, BBVA created a Retail Banking Legal Assistant GPT to help respond to approximately 40,000 legal inquiries related to clients received each year from branch managers. The GPT drafts responses based on multiple internal knowledge sources, significantly reducing the manual research time for the nine-person legal team.

In Mexico, a Customer Experience Assistant GPT analyzes thousands of open-ended responses to customer surveys, speeding up sentiment analysis, highlighting key themes, and recommending actions to improve customer experience more quickly and at scale.

In Peru, over 3,000 employees are now using an internal AI assistant that has reduced query processing times from 7.5 minutes to about 1 minute — an efficiency improvement of around 80%.

These examples illustrate a broader change underway at BBVA. What began as employee productivity gains is increasingly becoming a foundation for how the bank delivers services, makes decisions, and develops expertise within the organization.

Elena Alfaro, head of global AI adoption at BBVA, stated: "We have created a secure environment to learn and use AI."

Results at a Glance

• 100,000 employees using ChatGPT Enterprise worldwide
• 70%+ weekly active usage among deployed employees
• Approximately 3 hours saved per employee per week
• Up to 80% efficiency improvements in certain workflows
• 250 leaders trained, including the CEO and the president
• Security, legal, and compliance aligned from day one
• Employee-led AI adoption across business functions
• 8 major transformation initiatives under "The Eight"

Leadership Lessons

• Treat AI as a business transformation: BBVA approaches AI as a redesign of customer experience, operations, and working methods within the organization, rather than as a standalone innovation effort.

• Build with industry expertise: The collaboration combines OpenAI's cutting-edge AI capabilities with BBVA's deep expertise in banking, risk, operations, and customer experience.

• Scale securely from day one: Transforming a global financial institution with AI requires governance, data architecture, and security frameworks designed to scale within the organization.

• Empower employees with AI: By broadly extending AI capabilities to the entire workforce, BBVA enables employees to become active participants in the transformation of banking.

• Train leaders early: AI adoption accelerates when leaders actively use the technology themselves. Early training programs for leaders — including the CEO and the president — help establish AI as a strategic priority within the organization.

• Shift from a reactive bank to a proactive bank: The long-term ambition is not just greater efficiency, but a smarter, more personalized banking experience capable of anticipating customer needs.

What’s Next

For BBVA, the adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise is just one part of a much larger transformation. Through "The Eight," the bank is pursuing a long-term vision to reshape banking around AI, from customer engagement and commercial banking to risk, operations, software development, and employee productivity.

By working closely with OpenAI, BBVA continues to explore how AI can help create a more proactive, intelligent, and personalized banking experience while improving how work is done within the organization. The goal is not merely to deploy AI tools, but to rethink how a global bank operates in the age of AI.