Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Europe's main banking groups with about 13.9 million clients, more than 2,600 branches in Italy and over 90,000 employees, is using AI and generative AI to automate HR operations and make the HR function more strategic, according to a business case published by the Politecnico di Milano's Digital Innovation Observatories in May 2026. The bank had been digitalising HR processes since 2017, but analysis of its operating model still showed room to improve efficiency and free staff from administrative work.
In 2025 it launched the HR 2030 programme, which has three strands. First, HR managers, who still spent much of their time on contracts and process tasks, are becoming People & Business Partners, supported by an HR manager CRM that brings together data on people and teams and uses generative AI to interpret and summarise it into recommendations, for example on development, retention or support for line managers. Second, HR operations are moving toward a "Zero Operations" model: an AI virtual assistant built on a multi-agent architecture serves as the single access point to HR services for all employees, querying knowledge bases, accessing structured data and starting processes in real time, while an OCR system enhanced with agentic AI checks that an uploaded document, such as a parental leave certificate, is the right one, extracts the relevant information and enters it into HR systems without back-office review. Third, HR specialists get AI tools such as automated CV screening that matches required skills against candidate profiles.
Supporting these is an HR data fabric that integrates people data from the group's systems with formally assigned data owners, along with upskilling programmes, a new HR Academy and an internal community for sharing experience with AI tools. According to the bank, automation has so far covered 14 administrative processes, introducing about 1,950 automatic checks and reducing the share of cases flagged for manual handling from 28% to about 6%. The initiatives are being extended to all staff in Italy by the end of 2026, with the new operating model due to be completed by 2029.
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- Turin
- Organization
- Intesa Sanpaolo
- Continent