- Key insight: Some of American Banker's 2025 Best Banks to Work For are using AI to augment their workforces.
- What's at stake: The decision to use AI is extremely bank-specific. Some are embracing it; others are more cautious.
- Forward look: Banks that are utilizing AI say their employees are saving time on certain tasks.
Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every industry, including banking.
Banks appear to be using AI not to replace their workforces, but to augment them, said Indranil Bandyopadhyay, a principal analyst at Forrester.
"AI-powered tools are automating mundane, repetitive tasks such as data entry, compliance checks, and summarizing lengthy reports, thus freeing up employees to focus on more strategic, high-value work that requires human judgment and empathy," Bandyopadhyay said.
This shift is reducing employee burnout and increasing job satisfaction, he maintains, as AI assistants empower bank employees by providing them with instant access to information and real-time support.
In a
Here's a look at how four companies on
Potomac Bank
Potomac Bank in Charles Town, West Virginia, has used AI to analyze the results of American Banker's Best Banks to Work For survey, according to President and CEO Alice Frazier.
"As we were discussing the results in a senior leadership meeting, we wondered if AI could help us decipher the results into several areas of focus," Frazier said in an interview.
The bank's chief information officer loaded spreadsheets containing the 2023 and 2024 survey results into Microsoft Co-Pilot, and asked questions about year-over-year changes.
Frazier recalled the meeting where the bank's executives quickly received AI-generated summaries of the survey results.
"Literally, within a few minutes we had answers and summaries that would have taken our H.R. director many hours to complete," Frazier said. "That allowed us to move into developing action steps, rather than waiting for another meeting."
The bank's executive team then used that information to prepare an anonymous survey of its employees and host a focus group to gain further insights.
"This saved hours of resource time and allowed us to focus on the important matters," Frazier said.
Potomac Bank, which was until recently known as Bank of Charles Town, is also evaluating several software tools to update and manage its standard operating procedures. Currently, all of the bank's standard operating procedures are saved within Microsoft Word documents, with each one contained in its own document.
"For an employee to search for an answer on how to do something takes enormous time in research. Updating is equally cumbersome," Frazier said.
The bank is aiming to develop a tool that can assist with writing standard operating procedures, storing them, and more, Frazier said. "We believe onboarding and training new teammates with this tool will improve significantly," she added.
On the sales front, the bank's sales development leader has used AI to produce sales, service, and product training materials.
And Frazier said that she has used AI herself to write the bank's annual shareholder letter in each of the past two years. "I can't tell you how much time that saved me," she said.
Capital Bank
Rockville, Maryland-based Capital Bank has hired an AI lead within its technology organization, and it continues to add resources around AI within its strategy organization, according to CEO Ed Barry.
The bank has created an AI-powered intranet dubbed "Capital Bank GPT," which Barry described as essentially the bank's own AI tool "just within four walls."
"We've been piloting basically a Capital Bank AI environment using the Microsoft Copilot product," the CEO told American Banker. "So now we're getting all the different databases and policies and sources, and we're putting AI on top of that."
"So if you're an associate and you want to ask, 'Hey, what's our policy around family leave?' you can type that in, and it will pull it automatically and tell you, versus trying to find the policy," he said.
The AI will scrape all of the bank's internal data sources, policies, and board-approved procedures to "answer any question about the inner workings of Capital Bank," Barry said.
Other features that Capital Bank is rolling out by year's end: an AI tool that will help build custom training programs and a training database of external sources so that employees "can build their own AI-driven presentations and training programs around specific topics relevant to them," Barry said.
Ledyard National Bank
Ledyard National Bank, which does business in Vermont and New Hampshire, has what President and CEO Josephine Moran describes as "a very thoughtful process" around the implementation of AI.
Ledyard has created an AI policy and an AI Task Force. The initial focus, Moran said, is utilizing AI to make determinations like how the bank is going to create efficiencies, improve workflows, and generally "make it easier" for employees "to do their job."
The bank looked at several different back-office solutions, but it ultimately decided to upgrade its Microsoft CoPilot subscription so that it could have extra licenses. Meanwhile, employees are not allowed to use ChatGPT.
"We shut all of that off on our bank," Moran said, explaining that she sees ChatGPT as presenting security issues. In addition, since Ledyard is already using the Microsoft suite of products, it's easier for its CoPilot to pull from the bank's procedures and policies.
The bank is in the process of creating "a whole workflow" around using CoPilot so that employees can have access to all of the bank's policies, procedures, and standards.
For more coverage of American Banker's 2025 Best Banks to Work For, see here:
"This will create a lot of efficiencies for everyone," Moran told American Banker. "And then once we have all that, where we're monitoring it, and we know exactly how effective it is, then we can create other things."
Ledyard is also exploring options for an AI-based note-taking tool that will have built-in compliance features, so that when wealth advisors, for example, are meeting with clients, they can "completely engage in the conversation with the client instead of worrying about taking notes," she said.
BankPlus
Mississippi-based BankPlus has "embraced" AI as a practical tool "to elevate" how its employees work, communicate and serve customers, said President and CEO Jack Webb.
Earlier this year, BankPlus introduced AI-enabled communications platforms that Webb said have "transformed" how the institution delivers internal information.
"Employees absorb content in different ways. Some prefer audio, others visual or text," Webb told American Banker. "And now, thanks to AI, our communications team can create a single message and seamlessly convert it into a podcast, an animated slideshow, or an enhanced document. It's personalization at scale."
Webb is especially excited about BankPlus's newly launched generative AI-powered communication portal, which replaces its legacy intranet.
For more coverage of banks and how they're using AI, see here:
That intranet, according to Webb, "had become a maze of disconnected information silos."
"Now, employees across departments can instantly access accurate, up-to-date information that used to take a great deal of time to locate, if it could be found at all," he said. "This technology shift is saving time, boosting confidence, and fostering a more connected workplace."
Finally, BankPlus has just rolled out a predictive AI module within its internal customer service and ticketing systems.
Said Webb: "This will allow us to anticipate employee needs, resolve issues faster, and free up our teams to focus on what matters most: helping our customers."
