NatWest Group is significantly expanding its adoption of artificial intelligence across key operational areas, including customer service, wealth management document processing, and software development. This strategic push, detailed in a recent internal communication from Chief Information Officer Scott Marcar, marks 2025 as a pivotal year for the scaled deployment of these advanced systems, aiming to drive substantial improvements in productivity and customer engagement.
### Generative AI Enhancing Customer Interactions
In customer service, NatWest has integrated generative AI into “Cora,” its digital assistant. This expansion broadens Cora’s capabilities, increasing the number of supported customer journeys from four to 21. The bank reports a consequent acceleration in issue resolution times and a reduced reliance on human agents for routine inquiries.
Later this year, 25,000 customers will gain access to a new agentic financial assistant within Cora, powered by OpenAI’s models. This enhanced version will enable customers to query recent transactions and analyze spending patterns using natural language directly through the bank’s mobile application. The next evolutionary step will introduce voice-to-voice capabilities, incorporating nuanced tone and conversational elements. This will allow customers to report suspected fraud and manage associated cases seamlessly.
Internally, the impact of AI on customer service operations is primarily seen in time savings. For instance, automated call summarization and complaint drafting tools within the retail division have collectively saved over 70,000 staff hours. These AI-generated summaries streamline the process of responding to customer complaints by providing a concise overview of the interaction.
### Empowering Staff with AI Tools
Scott Marcar indicated that all approximately 60,000 employees at NatWest now have access to AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot Chat and the bank’s proprietary large language models (LLMs). Notably, over half of the staff have voluntarily pursued additional training beyond the foundational offerings, demonstrating a keen interest in leveraging these technologies.
### Streamlining Wealth Management
Within NatWest’s private banking and wealth management divisions, AI is instrumental in refining document management and client record-keeping. Relationship managers utilize AI to synthesize notes, meeting summaries, and correspondence, gaining a more comprehensive understanding of client circumstances. The AI systems generate concise summaries of meetings and documents, significantly reducing the time spent on reviewing and recording information. This efficiency gain translates to an estimated 30% increase in time available for direct client engagement, allowing advisors to focus more on providing strategic advice rather than administrative tasks.
### Infrastructure Underpinning AI Advancement
These advancements are underpinned by significant alterations to NatWest’s data infrastructure. The bank has restructured its data estate to establish unified customer views and has migrated substantial workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This strategic move, alongside the simplification of legacy systems, provides the robust data access and scalable computing capacity necessary to support sophisticated summarization tools and advanced conversational AI systems.
### AI’s Role in Software Development
Software development represents a third key area for AI deployment. The bank’s 12,000 engineers are leveraging AI-powered coding tools, with AI now contributing over a third of the company’s code, encompassing drafting, reviewing, and testing. In 2025, NatWest bolstered its engineering talent by hiring nearly 1,000 graduate software engineers in India and the UK.
Furthermore, trials of agentic engineering within its financial crime units have yielded a tenfold increase in productivity. NatWest plans to expand these agentic engineering practices more broadly, with a strategic objective to accelerate the development and iteration of its systems.
### Proactive Fraud Prevention and Ethical AI
Beyond operational efficiencies, NatWest has invested in AI-driven analytics for fraud detection and risk monitoring. These systems are designed to identify anomalous activity and alert customers to potential risks.
Complementing these operational deployments, NatWest has established a dedicated AI research office focused on emerging technologies such as audiovisual conversational systems and proprietary small language models. The bank has also formalized its governance structures through an AI and Data Ethics Code of Conduct and is actively participating in the Financial Conduct Authority’s Live AI Testing program, underscoring a commitment to responsible AI implementation.
### AI as an Integral Operating Component
Across customer service, wealth management, and software development, AI is now deeply embedded within NatWest’s workflows, delivering tangible time savings and productivity gains. The scale of deployment, impacting tens of thousands of employees and a growing proportion of customer interactions, signals that AI has transitioned from an experimental initiative to a fundamental component of NatWest’s operational model.
Original article, Author: Samuel Thompson. If you wish to reprint this article, please indicate the source:https://aicnbc.com/18551.html
