DBS will equip its 500-strong customer service officer (CSO) workforce in Singapore with a virtual assistant powered by generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) before the end of 2024, enabling the bank to serve the more than 250,000 consumer and corporate customers who have queries each month, more efficiently and effectively.

Dubbed “CSO Assistant”, the Gen AI co-pilot was developed completely in-house by the bank’s AI engineers, integrating a large language model tailored to local languages and parlance with voice telephony and speech recognition capabilities.

The virtual assistant transcribes customer queries in real time and does “live” searches on the bank’s database to quickly retrieve query-specific information, enabling CSOs to deliver relevant solutions more speedily. It also helps with post-call documentation by providing instant call summaries and pre-filling service request fields.

Based on data collected since pilots began in October 2023, CSO Assistant has demonstrated transcription and solutions accuracy of nearly 100%, and when fully deployed, is expected to reduce call handling time by up to 20%. Close to 90% of CSOs involved in the pilot reported that CSO Assistant had a positive impact on their workflow and expressed confidence in leveraging it in the longer term as a co-pilot.

Nimish Panchmatia, chief data and transformation officer at DBS, says: “We see Gen AI as a co-pilot to supercharge our employees, and our immediate focus has been on driving efficiency gains and quality improvement. CSO Assistant is a prime example of how we leverage Gen AI innovatively to remove toil in the way we work, which in turn enables our people to enhance customer journeys and deliver differentiated customer outcomes. In developing CSO Assistant, we took a measured approach by stress-testing it against our responsible data use frameworks, and iteratively enhancing it based on feedback received during the pilot.”

DBS is progressively rolling out CSO Assistant to other markets over the next 12 months, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong.

CSO Assistant is one of over 20 Gen AI use cases which DBS is implementing, identified from a pool of over 240 ideas generated internally in 2023. Another use case benefiting DBS employees is DBS-GPT, a Gen AI program similar to ChatGPT which the bank developed to help its employees with content generation and writing tasks in a secure environment. DBS-GPT is currently available to over 25,000 employees across the bank.

Photo: DBS customer service officers find CSO Assistant a big help in handling customer queries more effectively.