ABN AMRO Bank migrates to Microsoft Copilot Studio to support over 3.5 million customer conversations

ABN AMRO Bank is the third-largest bank in The Netherlands, with headquarters in Amsterdam. With over 22,000 employees, ABN AMRO serves over 5 million retail customers and 365,000 commercial clients across 15 countries.

Its operations include a private banking division as well as commercial and merchant banking operations that play a major role in energy, commodities and transportation markets.

The bank, which was already operating several chatbots, wanted to explore a new platform that would allow them to better implement AI capabilities. “With the rapid introduction of Generative AI, we anticipate that our customers are going to expect much more from a chatbot and we wanted to get ahead of that demand,” says Bobby van Groningen, IT Lead at ABN AMRO.

After a competitive RFP process in late 2023, ABN AMRO transitioned to Microsoft Copilot Studio. “Microsoft’s leadership and innovation in the AI space led us to select Microsoft Copilot Studio,” says van Groningen. “We also liked that many of the chatbot capabilities we needed were available out of the box. This contributed to an intuitive and easy-to-use development experience.”

Security was another important consideration. As van Groningen explains, “Together with our CISO team, we conducted an extensive, 3-month review and confirmed that Microsoft Copilot Studio met our stringent security requirements.” (Copilot Studio follows a number of security and governance controls and processes, including geographic data residency, data loss prevention, multiple standards certifications, regulatory compliance, environment routing, and regional customization.)

A successful migration

ABN AMRO’s transition to Copilot Studio covered both the bank’s customer-facing “Anna” chatbot – operating across text and voice channels – and the “Abby” chatbot, which provides support to the bank’s employees. Copilot Studio was used to create ‘agents’ – a new kind of AI-driven, natural-language experience that replaced the original chatbots.

The “Anna” agent supports over 2 million text conversations and 1.5 million voice conversations with customers every year and can cover a wide variety of topics – from help with unblocking a debit card or changing the withdrawal limit at an ATM – to navigating through the services provided in ABN AMROs digital bank. The “Abby” agent covers internal questions such as IT Helpdesk support and facilities services.

The migration to Copilot Studio was completed in just 6 months – driven by a successful partnership with Microsoft and Capgemini. “We helped anchor the partnership with our team and the ABN AMRO team, laying the groundwork for a successful implementation,” says Mark Oost, Vice President AI & Generative AI, Insights & Data at Capgemini.

These projects also fostered a close collaboration between ABN AMRO and Microsoft, resulting in significant product improvements and enhancements. Together, the teams achieved faster user experiences, enhanced dialog management capabilities, and reduced latency, driving the success of ABN AMRO’s digital transformation and setting new standards for performance and efficiency.

Microsoft Copilot Studio at the core

ABN AMRO's adoption of Copilot Studio is now central to the bank’s solution architecture. Chat interactions are passed from ABN AMRO Bank’s Azure middleware and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform which is used for both the voice and text channels of the Anna agent. Voice calls are processed in Azure Communication Services (ACS) before the middleware.

The middleware layer further enhances these interactions by leveraging Microsoft Copilot Studio as the dialog manager, integrated with Azure AI Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) for precise intent recognition and entity extraction. With Copilot Studio, the conversational IVR on the voice channel is able to understand customer inquiries and route them to the correct call center department. Additionally, it can fully resolve certain queries without escalating to a live agent, enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

To support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), ABN AMRO utilizes Azure DevOps in conjunction with Power Platform Build Tools. This technical setup facilitates efficient development, testing, and deployment processes, enabling rapid and reliable updates. The architecture’s scalability and integration with advanced AI capabilities allow ABN AMRO to continuously innovate, enhancing their customer-facing and employee-support solutions.

Multiple business benefits

Since migrating to Copilot Studio and deploying its new agents, ABN AMRO is enjoying several key benefits, including:

• Enhanced customer and employee experiences: The Anna agent, operating across both text and voice channels, has consistently delivered high customer satisfaction, while the IVR bot experienced reduced drop-off and transfer rates. The Abby agent, supporting internal employee needs, became a more effective and dependable tool, contributing to an overall streamlined userexperience.

• Superior accuracy in language processing: By integrating Azure AI Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) with Copilot Studio, ABN AMRO increased its accuracy rate in intent recognition by 7% for Dutch, leading to more precise and reliable customer and employee interactions.

• Faster time to market: As demonstrated by the 6-month migration, ABN AMRO foresees faster time to market for improvements and added functionality to its new agents plus faster launch of new products, including integration with other Power Platform products.

More agents in Copilot Studio planned

With Copilot Studio’s robust architecture, ABN AMRO is well-positioned to integrate advanced AI features, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns, and future developments like Large Language Models (LLMs) as the orchestration layer for intent recognition.

“ABN AMRO has created a maturity model towards having even more natural and productive conversations with our customers. This will be implemented via a combination of great features in Copilot Studio as well as strong Azure Services, like OpenAI models and Azure Search,” says van Groningen.

Looking to the future, ABN AMRO is already planning agents for other areas of the business. “Thanks to the efficiency of Microsoft Copilot Studio, we’re now able to develop chatbot support for a wide range of business applications – and get them into production very quickly,” says van Groningen.

Equally exciting is that the bank’s next new agent will be set up as a full, Generative AI agent. The project will also be used as a testing ground for similar, Generative AI-driven experiences in Anna. As van Groningen notes, “At ABN AMRO, we are just beginning our joint Generative AI journey. But with Microsoft Copilot Studio, we’re delivering the benefits of Generative AI quickly and effectively to our customers.”