Volksbank Group is a major cooperative network of 35 independent regional banks, employing more than 6,000 people and serving more than 1.6 million customers. The bank has a strong commitment to social responsibility and sustainability, and offers a broad range of financial products and services, including retail and corporate banking, insurance and asset management. “As a cooperative bank, what matters to Volksbank is helping people by whatever means necessary,” explains Horst Weichselbaumer-Lenck, CIO and CDO at Volksbank Austria. “In the face of any challenge, we always come together to find solutions for both our customers and our people.”

With the proliferation of new, AI-powered tools, leaders wanted to create new ways of working to stay relevant in a rapidly changing market — with all the security considerations required in the financial services industry. To explore possible solutions, build awareness among its people and ensure the successful adoption of AI, the bank partnered with Accenture and Avanade – a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft. Together, we identified use cases, focusing on people, platforms, data and change management.

We started by introducing possible AI and generative AI solutions to nearly 600 Volksbank employees through online sessions, videos and quizzes. From there, we ran a series of workshops with cross-functional teams — covering sales, marketing, finance, risk and IT — to brainstorm and prioritize possible use cases to test and validate. These included tools for customer service, fraud detection, credit scoring, document analysis, content generation and more.

“When it came to picking priorities, we wanted to start by focusing on productivity tools for our people,” says Weichselbaumer-Lenck. “We knew that once they started playing with different options, they’d be very impressed with the results.” Based on this priority, leaders chose two pilot projects to run:

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365
Together, we implemented Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 for 200 test users across roles and regions. After receiving comprehensive training, users were free to try the tools out to see how they can boost productivity, creativity and skills, and provided feedback on their experiences. The team also ensured the Microsoft 365 environment was configured and secured according to the bank’s standards and policies to protect patient data.

Intelligent chatbots
We also used generative AI to help employees consult the bank’s extensive database of documentation quickly, which was previously a long, manual process. By creating a set of intelligent chatbots, employees can now get fast answers to questions about the bank’s products and services based on natural language processing and generation.