Customer Ignite Talk: Antonio Bravo Acin (Global Head of AI Transformation, BBVA) & OpenAI

Antonio Bravo, BBVA’s Global Head of AI Transformation, says the bank has embedded AI into its core business through a top-down strategy of six robots and two pillars, rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to all 120,000 employees, and driven both adoption and business value. ## Background: Driven from the Top, Across the Entire Bank BBVA, one of the largest banks globally, didn’t let its AI strategy be driven solely by the tech team. Instead, it was shaped by the executive team together with business lines and country heads. The goal: shift AI from an add-on feature to a layer of business operations. The bank has deployed ChatGPT Enterprise to over 120,000 employees worldwide and built six specialized robots and two supporting pillars, each robot corresponding to a key business area and co-sponsored by the respective business leader. ## The Six Robots: Precisely Targeting Core Business **Robot #1 – Retail Robot** Focuses on digital channel experiences for retail customers. Over the past 10–15 years, BBVA has transformed distribution through mobile, and now aims to create new interaction modes in digital channels (phones, future devices) using AI. Co-sponsored by the head of retail and retail leaders across business units. **Robot #2 – Relationship Transformation (Banker Enablement)** Targets segments needing deep advisory — corporate banking, investment banking, commercial banking, and private banking. Bankers currently spend only about 20% of their time with clients. AI aims to help bankers devote more time to advice, raising that ratio to 25%, 30%, 35%. Co-led by heads of corporate, investment, private, and commercial banking. **Robot #3 – Risk Analysis Engine** Delivers AI capabilities to risk analysts for better, faster analysis, simplifies risk underwriting, and improves customer experience. This is the backbone of the bank’s core analytical capability. **Robot #4 – Processes & Back-Office Operations** Covers document extraction, information classification, and other back-office tasks — handling a large volume of paperwork related to mortgages, consumer finance, insurance, etc. **Robot #5 – Software Development (Codex Enablement)** BBVA is a large software development organization. By providing Codex to all software developers, they boost efficiency and clear long-standing backlogs. The goal is to fundamentally eliminate backlogs, not just optimize priorities. **Robot #6 – Connector Robot (Enterprise-Wide AI Enablement)** Deploys ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to every employee regardless of role, and helps them build general-purpose agents for managing calendars, email, HR tools, and other internal BBVA tools. A dedicated team drives global adoption. ## The Two Pillars: Data & Orchestration **Pillar #1 – Become a Data-Rich Company** Make all data ready for agents to consume. This is the foundation of the entire AI agenda. **Pillar #2 – Agent Network Orchestration** Manage and continuously improve the growing fleet of agents. Requires technical and company-wide orchestration to ensure newly deployed agents run smoothly and create a snowball effect. ## Operating Model & “Aha Moments” BBVA uses a top-down and bottom-up combination: - **Top-down**: The executive team prioritizes the six robots and assigns clear sponsors. - **Bottom-up**: Value created by everyone using the tools feeds back into priority-setting (“plant grass first, then build roads”) — let employees explore freely, then adjust formal strategy based on real usage patterns. **“Aha Moments”**: Every 2–3 months, a concrete, quantifiable business impact emerges, showing direction and proving investment value. These milestones also fuel the adoption snowball. **Cross-Functional Teams**: Data scientists, ML engineers, software developers, etc., are embedded directly into retail, commercial, risk, and other business teams — co-located to build agents together. This changed how they used to work. **Change Management & Culture**: Agents are worthless if employees don’t use them. BBVA invests heavily in training, communication, and spreading real, positive messages to eliminate fear and concern. ## Ecosystem Collaboration & Key Lessons Facing a hyper-dynamic tech environment (paradigm shifts every two to three weeks), BBVA firmly believes in collaborating with the ecosystem. They built a strong partnership with OpenAI, whose team helped the bank adjust direction and avoid over-investing in old paradigms. Antonio emphasizes: “We have made mistakes, and OpenAI has been extremely helpful in helping us realize when we are going in the wrong direction and need to shift.” ## Three Core Experiences Driving Adoption 1. **Focus & Resources**: Adoption is not just product deployment. BBVA set up a dedicated adoption team (global and country-level). They do more than online training — they go deep into teams (e.g., Mexico finance, Peru risk, Spain retail) for on-site training, showing specific use cases. The team tracks progress with metrics and adjusts plans for lagging regions. 2. **Make Leaders Heavy Users**: Every week (later every month), each leader in the organization receives an adoption dashboard showing their personal adoption level, peer benchmarking, and adoption status in their team. The CEO and Chairman also get dashboards, creating healthy competitive pressure. When leaders use the tool themselves, their teams follow. 3. **Enable First, Optimize Later**: Allow employees to freely create automation tools and GPTs, and observe which are heavily used. For example, over 100 GPTs are used by thousands of employees, with some use cases saving 70%–80% of time. These bottom-up innovations in turn provide valuable input for top-down strategy. --- Source: Customer Ignite Talk: Antonio Bravo Acin (Global Head of AI Transformation, BBVA) & OpenAI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNJSk90Lz1c)