Opotti, based on artificial intelligence, is now answering banking customers’ questions online – OP is recruiting dozens of artificial intelligence and data experts
The chatbot Opotti has been serving OP’s banking customers since June. Artificial intelligence (AI) trainers are continuously training Opotti to be a better customer servant. OP is investing in AI by recruiting over 50 new financial sector experts.
Opotti is answering banking customers’ questions at op.fi on weekdays, 8–22. At the end of the year, the aim is that Opotti will handle half of the questions asked from it without any human assistance.
– Last autumn, we trained some 20 AI trainers that are further developing Opotti. In insurance transactions, our chatbot Viljo is already independently handling circa 60 percent of the questions asked from it, explains Sameli Mäenpää, Chief Data Officer at OP.
Right now, OP is investing heavily in services of the new era, where AI plays a significant role. This year, Opotti and the chatbot Viljo that serves insurance customers will be able to answer over 200,000 customer questions online, with the answer time per question being less than a second. The questions that customers are asking via chat have to do with, for example, loss reports and opening and closing accounts.
– AI lies behind our digital home loan service, for example. It makes decisions based on the same data as humans do, but faster. AI is working hard in the background of many everyday services without the customers noticing it, Mäenpää says.
OP is recruiting 50 new financial sector experts
As AI is becoming more common, that also requires new kinds of experts. Right now, OP is recruiting over 50 artificial intelligence experts with the following titles, for example: Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst and Developer. In their work, the new experts will combine the possibilities of AI and software robotics.
– OP has one of the largest data scientist teams in Finland. Its task is to refine data and to help us utilise it better for customers’ benefit. AI creates new job descriptions, but person-to-person customer service will remain. In the future, customer care representatives can focus on more complicated customer problems when AI takes care of the simple questions efficiently, Mäenpää says.
Further information and requests for interviews:
OP Communications, tel. +358 50 5239904
OP Financial Group is Finland's largest financial services group whose mission is to create sustainable prosperity, security and wellbeing for its owner-customers and in its operating region by means of its strong capital base and efficiency. OP Financial Group consists of 153 member cooperative banks, its central cooperative OP Cooperative, and the latter's subsidiaries and affiliates. The Group has a staff of 12,000 and 1.9 million owner-customers. www.op.fi