BMO’s Virtual Connect contact centre handles more than 500,000 calls from Canadian clients about credit card transactions each year, with each call currently taking an average of 12-14 minutes to resolve. To transform this process, BMO’s new AI Agent Assist brings AI-enabled transaction matching, policy retrieval and request preparation to employees for review, reducing manual work and helping employees focus more of their time on serving clients.
With AI Agent Assist, BMO aims to reduce the time spent to resolve eligible client inquiries by 20-30 per cent for eligible calls and to process about 40 per cent of eligible credit refund requests automatically.
“When clients call us about a credit card transaction, they want clarity and a quick resolution. AI Agent Assist gives our employees the information and guidance they need, so they can spend less time moving between systems and more time helping the client. For qualifying requests, that could mean receiving a credit as soon as the same day.”
From one use case to reusable AI capabilities
BMO is designing the capabilities behind AI Agent Assist for reuse across the bank, enabling BMO to deploy proven and trusted agentic AI capabilities across other client experiences and business processes.
The work supports BMO’s broader enterprise AI ambition, its focus on translating AI investments into measurable value for clients and the business, and its goal of generating more than $1 billion in AI-enabled revenue growth, productivity improvements and operating efficiencies by 2030.
“We’re focused on applying AI where it can deliver meaningful, measurable outcomes for our clients and our business. We’re bringing agentic AI to a high-volume client experience to make it faster and simpler, while building reusable capabilities that support the next generation of AI solutions across BMO. This is how we broaden from individual use cases to AI at scale with clear guardrails and our people accountable for every decision. As AI agents play a growing role in financial services, we’re focused on helping clients safely benefit from the technology with the right protections and oversight in place – backstopped by the trust they have in their bank.”
Scaling AI responsibly
As BMO scales these capabilities, human judgment remains central to the client experience. AI Agent Assist is designed for internal use by BMO’s client service team, whose employees are accountable for reviewing AI-generated information and making appropriate servicing decisions.
This approach aligns with BMO’s Responsible AI Principles, which guide how employees build, operate and evaluate AI across the bank.
