BBVA, a global financial institution founded in 1857, has formed a strategic alliance with OpenAI to transform banking around artificial intelligence. The collaboration began in 2024 with an initial deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to 3,000 employees and has since expanded to more than 100,000 employees globally, making BBVA one of the largest enterprise adopters of generative AI in the financial sector (OpenAI News). By the end of 2025, the partnership evolved into a broader strategic initiative called "The Eight," BBVA's AI transformation roadmap for redesigning banking end-to-end—from customer experience and commercial banking to risk, operations, software development, and employee productivity (OpenAI News).
BBVA's approach prioritizes governance, trust, and structured learning, with security, legal, and compliance teams aligned from the outset. Employees have created more than 20,000 custom GPTs across the organization, with approximately 4,000 used frequently by teams worldwide (OpenAI News). Specific use cases demonstrate measurable impact: a Credit Analysis Pro GPT accelerates credit risk assessments, a Retail Banking Legal Assistant GPT handles approximately 40,000 annual client-related inquiries, and an internal AI assistant in Peru reduced average query handling times from approximately 7.5 minutes to around 1 minute—an efficiency improvement of roughly 80% (OpenAI News). Across the deployed workforce, weekly active usage exceeds 70%, and employees save approximately 3 hours per week (OpenAI News). For commerce practitioners, this case study illustrates how to embed AI capabilities across business functions while maintaining security and compliance in a regulated environment, and how to drive adoption through leadership participation and formal enablement programs.
BBVA's transformation demonstrates a shift from treating AI as a standalone technology initiative to rethinking how a global organization operates in an AI-native era. The bank trained 250 senior leaders, including the CEO and chairman, early in the rollout—a leadership participation strategy that became a major accelerator for adoption (OpenAI News). As financial services and commerce organizations evaluate their own AI roadmaps, BBVA's structured approach to scaling generative AI securely, combined with its focus on employee empowerment and domain expertise, offers a blueprint for enterprise-wide transformation.