Dive Brief:
- Citi will deploy agentic AI capabilities to employees as part of an update to its Citi Stylus Workspaces platform, according to a Monday announcement. The effort will start this month with a pilot group of 5,000 workers, the company said in an email.
- Citi Stylus Workspaces, first introduced in December 2024, is a proprietary platform that uses Google’s Gemini and Anthropic's Claude models, a Citi spokesperson said in an email. "Employees can now conduct in-depth research, extract insights from vast datasets and streamline multi-stage workflows into a single, automated process," per the announcement.
- In one example use case, the tool can identify Citi's primary branded credit card partners in the U.S., outline and then translate their strategic goals into another language using a single prompt from employees.
Dive Insight:
Like several of its sector peers, Citi has long been working to accelerate technology modernization, running widescale overhauls of its underlying systems en route to AI deployments.
The financial services firm has earmarked billions each year for IT estate modernization. In 2023, the company spent nearly $12 billion on technology, sunsetting hundreds of legacy technology applications in the process. So far this fiscal year, the company has spent $4.7 billion on technology.
“Our transformation is addressing decades of underinvestment in large parts of Citi’s infrastructure and in our risk and control environment,” said CEO Jane Fraser last year, as the company detailed a modernization roadmap.
Citi’s tech investment plans were triggered in part by two fines from the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last year, totalling more than $130 million, over its failure to address data quality issues.
Updates to Citi's underlying technology systems have paved the way for AI adoption.
The company's wealth advisory division rolled out two AI-powered advisory platforms last month to assist with client communication. Earlier this year, Citi equipped 30,000 developers with generative AI coding tools.
To help lead AI development and deployment, the company tapped former IBM executive Shobhit Varshney as its head of AI earlier this month. Varshney will report to COO Anand Selvakesari and partner with Citi's broader leadership team to steer AI adoption.
