BBVA and OpenAI are expanding a multi-year collaboration to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise to about 120,000 employees. After a pilot saving roughly three hours per week on routine tasks, BBVA is scaling AI from productivity to workflows and customer channels, including prototypes for a ChatGPT-native banking app and its “Blue” assistant.

Why it matters now: BBVA is expanding its OpenAI partnership and giving ChatGPT Enterprise to ~120,000 employees, following a pilot that reportedly saved staff around three hours per week on routine tasks. This marks one of the largest enterprise AI rollouts in global banking.

What’s new

• Global rollout to ~120k people. BBVA is scaling ChatGPT Enterprise across the group as part of a multi-year AI transformation. Bloomberg+1

• From pilots to production. After an initial deployment (c. 11k users) and documented time savings, BBVA is moving from productivity use cases to workflow automation and customer-facing channels. Bloomberg+1

• Beyond the back office. BBVA has been prototyping a conversational banking app inside ChatGPT and advancing Blue, its AI assistant for customers—signalling future, natively conversational banking experiences. Finextra Research+1

How it works (at a glance)

• ChatGPT Enterprise provides an enterprise-grade AI assistant with admin controls, data privacy, and higher limits suitable for regulated workloads. BBVA is embedding it into day-to-day work and selected processes (legal, operations, customer support), with OpenAI providing strategic support on scaling patterns.

Practical use cases

1. Front-line knowledge at speed
   Drafting answers to complex policy or product queries; BBVA built a Retail Banking Legal Assistant to help handle c. 40k questions/year from branches.

2. Operations & middle-office
   Summarising cases, generating first drafts, and pulling policy excerpts, freeing humans for judgement calls. Time-savings from the pilot suggest meaningful weekly hours returned.

3. Customer experience
   Progression from web/app chat to conversational journeys via Blue and potential ChatGPT-native banking experiences (discovery, FAQs, next-best action).

4. Risk & compliance enablement
   Structured prompts that cite policies, keep audit trails, and route edge cases to specialists (pattern informed by OpenAI’s BBVA case notes).

Benefits BBVA is targeting

• Employee empowerment at scale: secure AI access for ~120k people.

• Efficiency & speed: early ~3 hours/week savings in the pilot phase.

• AI-native ways of working: moving from individual use to workflow and customer channels.

• Innovation signals to market: prototypes like ChatGPT-native banking apps.

Guardrails: what banks must get right

• Data governance & privacy: apply bank-grade DLP, logging, and redaction; use enterprise instances and allow-listing to control integrations. (See BBVA and OpenAI’s emphasis on enterprise deployment.)

• Prompt & model risk management: define approved prompts, review outputs, and embed escalation patterns; treat prompts like code.

• Compliance & auditability: ensure model usage is recorded and explainable; align with regional regulations.

• Change management: training, prompt playbooks, and measurable adoption are essential to reach BBVA-like scale.

What this means for UK & EU banks

BBVA’s move shows that scale is possible now—with privacy-preserving enterprise AI and real ROI signals. If you’re in a regulated market, the playbook is clear: start with knowledge workflows, measure time saved, then extend to controlled customer-facing journeys.

FAQs

Q1: How many BBVA employees will get ChatGPT Enterprise?
Around 120,000, as BBVA scales its OpenAI partnership group-wide. Bloomberg

Q2: What results did BBVA see in pilots?
A reported ~3 hours/week saved on routine tasks for early users, which supported the wider rollout. Bloomberg

Q3: Will AI reach customer channels?
Yes—BBVA is advancing Blue (its AI assistant) and has demonstrated a ChatGPT-native conversational banking app concept. Cinco Días+1

Q4: Is this secure for a bank?
BBVA uses ChatGPT Enterprise with enterprise controls and is embedding AI under a structured, scalable governance approach. OpenAI