Santander reports €35 million in business value generated from AI in Q1 2026, says it is on track to exceed €200 million by year-end, and has set a target of more than €1 billion in business value from AI between 2026 and 2028 through a combination of additional revenue and cost reductions. It has more than 280 process automation agents in production, and on 22 June 2026 it extended AI access from nearly 40,000 actively using employees to all 185,000 employees worldwide. Ricardo Martín Manjón, Santander's chief data & AI officer, writes: “For me, being AI-first means applying AI where it can have tangible impact.”
The bank says it is focusing on three priorities: making the bank faster, safer and more efficient through areas such as process automation; using AI to open new sources of growth; and helping its people embed AI into their day-to-day work. The 280-plus agents help automate manual tasks and support end-to-end workflows across areas such as credit, fraud, Know Your Customer (KYC) and operations. In Brazil, AI is used in card fraud claims, making the process around 95% faster, with up to 90% automation and an error rate below 1%.
In customer service, the bank is beginning to roll out AI within its UK voice channels to support card-related queries. The target is around 240,000 calls (40% of annual volume) resolved through self-service, saving customers around 26,000 hours and giving service teams around 45,000 hours back. The capability is also being applied in Santander and Openbank in Spain. In Spain, machine learning and real-time data are used at onboarding to assess whether a new customer may be eligible for a credit card from day one.
Openbank's AI models process approximately 100,000 anti-money laundering alerts per year, and investigations that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes. In May 2026, over 17,000 people were working with agentic AI in software development, and 40% of all code in June was developed by AI. In payments, Getnet is using AI to improve the experience for international customers and merchants, and Santander says it was the first bank in Europe to test payments with AI agents with Mastercard and the first in Latin America to do so with Visa.
For employees, Microsoft Copilot supports everyday productivity, including advanced Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences. The broader strategy uses a secure, multi-provider approach for more specialized capabilities, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, startups and other technology partners, and G42 on AI-enabled banking solutions. Santander says it does not share customer data externally to train third-party models and that AI-enabled processes operate within secure environments.
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