June 11, 2026
BBVA, a global financial institution founded in 1857, is entering a new phase of transformation by placing artificial intelligence at the core of its banking operations. Through a strategic collaboration with OpenAI, BBVA is redesigning banking across customer experience, operations, and work. The initiative spans Europe, Mexico, South America, Turkey, and the U.S., serving tens of millions of customers.
The collaboration began in 2024 with an initial deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to 3,000 employees. As adoption grew organically, BBVA expanded access, and today more than 100,000 employees globally use ChatGPT Enterprise, making BBVA one of the largest enterprise adopters of generative AI in the financial sector. The deployment demonstrated how generative AI could scale securely inside a highly regulated organization while delivering measurable operational impact.
By the end of 2025, the collaboration evolved into a broader strategic alliance centered around "The Eight," BBVA's AI transformation roadmap for redesigning banking end-to-end—from customer experience and commercial banking to risk, operations, software development, and employee productivity. Rather than treating AI as a standalone technology initiative, BBVA is rethinking how the bank operates across every layer: how customers interact with financial services, how employees make decisions, how risk is analyzed, and how operations are executed at scale.
"Our alliance with OpenAI accelerates the native integration of artificial intelligence across the bank to create a smarter, more proactive, and completely personalized banking experience, anticipating the needs of every client," said Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA.
The initiative includes AI-powered financial assistants capable of anticipating customer needs, tools that help bankers and risk analysts make faster and more informed decisions, and systems that automate operations and accelerate software development. OpenAI is working closely with BBVA teams across engineering, research, product development, and operations to develop and scale these AI capabilities securely.
"'The Eight' is about building a more proactive, intelligent, and personalized bank. Working closely with OpenAI allows us to rethink customer experience, operations, and employee capabilities at a scale that was not possible before," said Antonio Bravo, Head of AI Transformation at BBVA.
BBVA built its AI adoption strategy around three core pillars: trust, governance, and structured learning. Security, legal, compliance, and technology teams were aligned from the beginning to ensure employees had access to trusted AI tools within clear governance frameworks. Instead of allowing unauthorized experimentation with consumer AI tools, the bank provided secure enterprise-grade access and formal enablement programs.
To support adoption at scale, BBVA created a structured enablement framework including an organization-wide AI champions network and advanced users known as AI "wizards." These teams lead hands-on workshops, help colleagues integrate ChatGPT into everyday workflows, and identify valuable use cases. Leadership participation became a major accelerator: BBVA provided specific training to 250 leaders, including the CEO and chairman, and today members of the executive committee are among the most active ChatGPT users.
"We consider our investment in ChatGPT an investment in our people. AI amplifies our potential and helps us be more efficient and creative," said Elena Alfaro, Head of Global AI Adoption at BBVA.
As adoption expanded, employees across BBVA began building custom GPTs tailored to specialized workflows. To date, employees have created more than 20,000 GPTs, with approximately 4,000 used frequently by teams around the world.
In credit risk, BBVA developed Credit Analysis Pro GPT, which accelerates assessments by extracting and analyzing unstructured data from annual reports, ESG disclosures, and media coverage—work that was previously manual and time-intensive. In legal services, a Retail Banking Legal Assistant GPT helps respond to approximately 40,000 annual client-related legal inquiries from branch managers, dramatically reducing manual research time for the nine-person legal team. In Mexico, a Client Experience Assistant GPT analyzes thousands of open-ended customer survey responses, accelerating sentiment analysis and surfacing key themes. In Peru, more than 3,000 employees use an internal AI assistant that has reduced average query handling times from approximately 7.5 minutes to around 1 minute—an efficiency improvement of roughly 80%.
These examples illustrate a broader shift: what began as employee productivity gains is increasingly becoming a foundation for how the bank delivers services, makes decisions, and scales expertise.
Results at a glance:
- 100,000 employees using ChatGPT Enterprise globally
- 70%+ weekly active usage across deployed employees
- ~3 hours saved per employee, per week
- Up to 80% efficiency gains in selected workflows
- 250 senior leaders trained, including the CEO and chairman
- Security, legal, and compliance aligned from day one
- Employee-led AI adoption across business functions
- 8 major transformation initiatives under "The Eight"
Leadership lessons from BBVA's transformation include treating AI as business transformation, building with domain expertise, scaling securely from day one, empowering employees with AI, training leadership early, and moving from reactive to proactive banking.
For BBVA, ChatGPT Enterprise adoption is only one part of a much larger transformation. Through "The Eight," the bank is pursuing a long-term vision for redesigning banking around AI. Working closely with OpenAI, BBVA continues to explore how AI can create a more proactive, intelligent, and personalized banking experience while improving how work gets done. The goal is not simply to deploy AI tools, but to rethink how a global bank operates in an AI-native era.