Banking in the AI age: How BMO is shaping the future of digital customer experience

From intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants to predictive insights and content generation, Generative AI has unlocked new levels of efficiency and innovation—pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in modern banking.

Not one to be left behind, BMO Financial Group, one of the biggest banks operating in North America, was recently recognised for its groundbreaking use of Gen AI to elevate its customer experience, receiving an award for the ‘Best Use of Gen AI for Customer Experience’ at the Digital CX Awards 2025, hosted by The Digital Banker, at the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore.

Empowering employees

BMO operates in a highly regulated Canadian banking environment with numerous polices and processes that continuously evolve due to regulatory updates, system changes, and operational enhancements. Employees – whether they are new hires, advancing into new roles, or experienced staff – must navigate a broad and complex knowledge base to perform their jobs effectively.

To smoothen processes, BMO launched an initiative to create a centralised Gen AI-powered bot, that would serve as a one-stop-shop for employees seeking quick, accurate answers to policy and process-related inquiries. Developed in-house, this bot streamlines access to information, ensuring that employees can confidently and effectively retrieve the latest guidance, reference documents, and procedural steps. By eliminating the friction of searching through disparate resources, the solution enables employees to focus on high value customer interactions, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure compliance and accuracy.

Employees can now seamlessly navigate over 8,000 policies, procedures, learning process guides and operational manuals. With bilingual support (English and French) and an intuitive interface, it ensures quick access to accurate information, boosts compliance, productivity, and employee satisfaction – ultimately elevating service quality for customers.

Standing out from the crowd

BMO’s Gen AI-powered bot stands out from traditional chatbot solutions by delivering a highly personalised, intelligent and secure user experience. Unlike generic AI models, BMO’s solution is designed with banking-specific enhancements in mind that prioritise accuracy, comprehension and compliance.

One of its standout features includes the ability to have personalised, context-aware conversations. This is because the solution integrates a human into the loop mechanism to refine responses. For example, when the bot encounters ambiguous or complex queries, it proactively engages the user to clarify intent before delivering an answer. The solution is boosted by a question analytics engine that dynamically generates a question plan, breaking down queries into structure components, significantly improving recall and accuracy.

Other chatbot solutions generally tend to struggle with interpreting tables, charts and multi-format data. BMO’s solution has been designed to overcome this hurdle, converting content into HTML, thus preserving the relationship between topics and ensuring only the most accurate information is retrieved. This ultimately helps employees receive structured, contextual answers from a variety of document types, significantly enhancing usability and efficiency.

Additionally, the bot has also been designed to evolve with every interaction, learning from user feedback to refine its responses and thus improving over time.

Finally, as security is paramount in banking, the bank’s chatbot incorporates enterprise grade authentication and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detection. These measures ensure compliance to regulatory requirements and protect sensitive data.

Technology for good

Rolling out this chatbot has helped BMO optimise internal processes, reducing inefficiencies, and empowered its employees with instant and accurate information. This in turn has resulted in streamlining of complex processes, as the chatbot eliminates the need for employees to navigate lengthy processes, reducing the time spent searching for procedural insights. Now, employees get answers to their questions quickly, making banking interactions smoother and more efficient.

It has also increased banker capacity for high value activities. By automating knowledge retrieval, the chatbot frees up employees to focus on client needs, helping clients make real financial progress. This in turn has helped increase the quality of customer interactions, while also enabling bankers to expedite banking processes.

Charting the path forward

The Gen AI bot currently supports over 8,000 Canadian frontline employees, with plans to be available to over 14,000 Canadian Personal and Business Banking employees by the end of 2025.

BMO says the future of this project is centred around “continuous evolution, efficiency, and deeper integration into our infrastructure”, thus ensuring that the bot remains scalable, intelligent, and a high-impact tool for employees as the banking landscape shifts. Some focal points include:

• Ongoing learning and AI evolution: The chatbot will continue to learn and evolve, incorporating user feedback and leveraging the latest advancements in AI and machine learning. This ensures that the tool remains relevant, adaptive and valuable for employees.
• Expanding capabilities into complex tasks and deeper insights: Moving beyond Q&A into handling more complex, multi-step, multi-system processes.
• Integration with core banking systems: Exploring integrations with internal banking systems to provide more nuanced and precise insights on real time data.
• Cost and efficiency optimisation: Enhancing system architecture to make the bot more efficient to run and scale.

Looking ahead, the bank says its chatbot is not just a digital tool but a strategic enabler that will continue to elevate its digital CX, optimise banking operations and serve as a foundation for future AI-led innovations within the bank.