BBVA puts AI at the core of banking with OpenAI

Founded in 1857, BBVA is a global financial institution supporting people and businesses across Europe, Mexico, South America, Turkey, and the U.S., serving tens of millions of customers worldwide. After pioneering digital and mobile banking over the last decade, BBVA is now entering a new phase: transforming banking around artificial intelligence.

To accelerate that transformation, BBVA and OpenAI have formed a strategic collaboration designed to integrate AI across customer experiences, operations, software development, and the day-to-day work of employees throughout the organization. The collaboration marks a new level of partnership between a global financial institution and OpenAI, with teams from both companies working together on shared priorities and long-term transformation initiatives.

By the end of 2025, that collaboration had evolved into a broader strategic alliance centered around "The Eight," BBVA's AI transformation roadmap for redesigning banking end-to-end—from customer experience and commercial banking to risk, operations, software development, and employee productivity.

Rather than approaching AI as a standalone technology initiative, BBVA is rethinking how the bank operates across every layer of the organization: how customers interact with financial services, how employees make decisions, how risk is analyzed, and how operations are executed at scale.

The initiative spans every layer of the bank: from AI-powered financial assistants capable of anticipating customer needs, to tools that help bankers and risk analysts make faster and more informed decisions, to systems that automate operations and accelerate software development across the organization.

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

The relationship between BBVA and OpenAI began in 2024 with an initial deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to 3,000 employees across multiple countries and business areas. As adoption accelerated organically, BBVA expanded access across the organization.

Today more than 100,000 employees globally use ChatGPT Enterprise, making BBVA one of the largest enterprise adopters of generative AI in the financial sector.

Teams across legal, risk, engineering, operations, finance, marketing, and customer service integrated ChatGPT into everyday workflows. The deployment demonstrated how generative AI could scale securely inside a highly regulated organization while delivering measurable operational impact across the business.

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

Rather than allowing unauthorized experimentation with consumer AI tools, the bank chose to provide employees with secure enterprise-grade access and formal enablement programs.

To support adoption at scale, BBVA created a structured enablement framework that included an organization-wide AI champions network, along with advanced users known internally as AI “wizards.” These teams lead hands-on workshops, help colleagues integrate ChatGPT into everyday workflows, and identify valuable use cases across the organization.

Leadership participation became a major accelerator for adoption. BBVA provided specific training to 250 leaders, including the CEO and chairman, and today members of the executive committee are among the company's most active ChatGPT users.

Once employees began seeing practical value in their daily work, adoption expanded organically across the company.

As adoption expanded, employees across BBVA began building custom GPTs tailored to specialized workflows across legal, risk, customer service, finance, and marketing. To date, employees have created more than 20,000 GPTs across the organization, with approximately 4,000 used frequently by teams around the world.

In credit risk, 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-intensive. By automating these tasks, analysts can focus more on strategic analysis and higher-value work, including how ESG factors are incorporated into risk models.

In legal services, BBVA created a Retail Banking Legal Assistant GPT to help respond to approximately 40,000 annual client-related legal inquiries received from branch managers. The GPT drafts responses by pulling from multiple internal knowledge sources, dramatically reducing manual research time for the nine-person legal team.

In Mexico, a Client Experience Assistant GPT analyzes thousands of open-ended customer survey responses, accelerating sentiment analysis, surfacing key themes, and recommending actions that help improve customer experience faster and at scale.

In Peru, more than 3,000 employees now use an internal AI assistant that has reduced average query handling times from approximately 7.5 minutes to around 1 minute—an efficiency improvement of roughly 80%.

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

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

Working closely with OpenAI, BBVA is continuing to explore how AI can help create a more proactive, intelligent, and personalized banking experience while improving how work gets done across the organization. The goal is not simply to deploy AI tools, but to rethink how a global bank operates in an AI-native era.