Citi's Services unit, which provides cash management, payments, trade finance and asset custody for 19,000 corporate clients in 100 countries, uses a set of AI virtual assistants. Shahmir Khaliq, Citi's head of Services, said of the Ops Assist onboarding assistant: "Previously, when a client would deliver us a deck of documents — signature cards, account opening forms — it took a few hours. That time has been reduced by something like 80%, to 10 to 15 minutes."
Khaliq told American Banker that clients expect best execution but also the cheapest execution, and that the unit's mission is to drive down the cost of the service year over year. AI is part of that agenda alongside platform modernization. He said Citi chose its use cases after a careful analysis of processes: "We hand-picked those processes where we felt we could make the biggest difference."
Citi has developed a set of virtual assistants for Citi Services employees and customers. Most are based on Google Gemini, but some also use technology from Llama and Anthropic; bank executives declined to say which models underpin each assistant. Agent Assist has been given to the unit's 1,200 customer-service agents, who receive more than three million queries a year. It lets them find the information they need from a simple chat interface, where previously they had to go into multiple systems to look for answers, and the bank says it delivers more accurate answers than humans on their own.
Sales Assist helps sales teams interact with clients by analyzing their requests and providing background information, and an RFP response tool analyzes client information and requests for proposals and suggests responses. A few customers are piloting a chatbot on the Citi Direct banking portal called Client Assist, which lets customers talk to their data, for instance to ask for the status of a payment or an account balance. Ops Assist helps with document processing and operational workflows: it scans documents, extracts needed elements and feeds that data into the bank's other software programs.
Humans remain in the loop. Khaliq said: "Not every model is 100% efficient, so you will need to have some oversight and some constant review of the model." He added that the accelerated use of AI does not necessitate headcount reductions because the Services unit has been growing.
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