BPI eyes agentic AI for lending

BANK of the Philippine Islands (BPI) is eyeing to use agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate parts of its lending process, its top official said.

“We are beginning a project where we are going to put our whole lending platform on AI and hopefully use agentic AI to service some of the loan approvals and loan processes,” BPI President and CEO Jose Teodoro K. Limcaoco told reporters on the sidelines of an event last week.

Mr. Limcaoco said they aim to roll out the project’s initial phase before yearend.

“That’s maybe a one- or two-year project, but we will do it in phases, and we hope to get the first phase up by maybe this December,” he said.

Agentic AI uses “agents” for specific tasks with minimal human supervision. These systems can work autonomously and make decisions based on data, probability, and patterns learned from interactions.

The official said BPI has already been tapping various AI-driven tools, particularly for customer service.

Last month, BPI revamped its digital assistant BEA Chat using an AI-powered ChatGPT platform. The chatbot can now accommodate service requests in real time, assist users with self-service transactions, and forward complex concerns to live agents. It is accessible 24/7 via the bank’s website and Facebook page.

“We’ve used it (AI) in credit modeling, but if you’re talking about the latest wave of AI, which is large language models and generative AI, then we do have a tool today that’s being used by the team where we are working off a ChatGPT platform where we ingested all our policies, procedures, and products. That way, our team is able to query our huge database… and get a consistent answer that we give to clients. So, that’s one,” Mr. Limcaoco added.

“We’re now also beginning to test what I would call AI-driven voice bots,” he said.

BPI’s net income rose by 7.02% to P16.44 billion in the second quarter to bring its first-semester profit to P32.96 billion. — Katherine K. Chan