Citadele Banka cuts service wait times to under 5 seconds with Azure AI assistant

Citadele Banka is on a journey to become a truly modern banking platform for the Baltics, providing unique, personalized digital products for its private and business clients.

Innovation is a core part of its culture, and the business wanted to explore the potential of introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot into its operation. Starting with several pilot programs, the business quickly became confident that current AI models were mature enough to deliver real, practical value. Citadele Banka then decided to scale its use of AI, developing several in-house solutions using Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI services.

It was clear to Citadele Banka that AI tools could provide the strategic edge it was seeking. The real challenge was ensuring its people had the skills, knowledge, and confidence to leverage and extract the maximum benefit from those tools. 

‘Adele’ transforms customer service 

Citadele Banka recognized the value AI could deliver in a key part of its business: customer service. This led to the creation of Adele, a customer-facing, multi-agent virtual assistant.

Built on Microsoft Azure, Adele handles around 40% of Citadele Banka's daily customer conversations, typically answering queries about Citadele Banka's products and services.

Adele's impact on customer service has been significant. “Our AI-powered virtual assistant, Adele, has received very positive feedback from our customers,” says Vladislavs Keziks, Head of AI Competence Center at Citadele Banka. “They like the fact that they can get an almost instant answer to queries instead of waiting for a response from our call center.”

Adele can retrieve information from over 3,500 data sources and respond in under five seconds on average. With answer quality at 87% and supported by a regular quality improvement process, customers are increasingly turning to Adele for digital support. Since December 2024, total Adele usage has increased by 221%, while usage through the mobile app has grown by 459%.

Soon, Citadele Banka plans to deliver native integration of Adele into its internet banking platform and Leasing Portal and introduce customer-specific personalization with access to individual data and context. 

Employee AI-powered agents speed up internal service delivery 

Building on the success of Adele, Citadele Banka created a broad set of AI-powered agents for its employees, available via Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal Citadele Chat.

Developing these in-house agents using Microsoft Azure enabled secure integration with legacy systems and internal knowledge bases, providing employees with near-instant access to internal knowledge and accelerating internal service delivery. These agents include:

• IT Support Copilot 
  Assists employees with technical issues related to Citadele Banka infrastructure, leveraging internal IT knowledge and achieving satisfaction rates close to 95%.

• Ask HR Copilot
  Provides instant answers to HR-related queries, policies, and practical tips, reducing wait times for HR business partners and improving employee response times.

• Procedures Copilot
  Helps employees navigate hundreds of internal regulations, find and compare documents, and translate them into local languages, supporting compliance and operational efficiency across three countries.

• Learning Materials Copilot 
  Helps employees quickly find, understand, and navigate learning and knowledge materials. It provides contextual answers and guidance based on internal learning content, enabling faster onboarding, continuous upskilling, and more efficient knowledge reuse across the organization.

• SkyBranch Copilot 
  Supports SkyBranch and call center employees in their daily work by enabling fast and accurate access to internal procedures, guidelines, and documentation from multiple Confluence knowledge bases. 

In addition to centrally delivered employee agents, Citadele Banka employees regularly create AI agents using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio. Agents can be created through fast, no-code/low-code automation, making daily work faster and more efficient.

User-created agents have been deployed across the business for an array of tasks, from credit memo preparation and financial analysis to internal translations, contract reviews, and property valuation analysis. Combined, these agents are helping to significantly reduce manual effort, streamline routine knowledge-work tasks, and accelerate decision-making across departments.

By enabling employees to develop their own agents, Citadele Banka has created a culture where its people feel genuinely empowered to innovate and find solutions to internal challenges. 

AI-powered document intelligence platform

Citadele Banka’s Document Intelligence Platform has also had a major impact. Every day, the business processes a huge array of documents across multiple domains, including operational, insurance, financial, legal, identity, and compliance.

Leveraging Microsoft Azure's capabilities, the platform automates this entire end-to-end process—rapidly converting unstructured data into structured data, registering documents in business systems and electronic archives, and integrating with digital channels.

Since introducing the platform, document processing times have been reduced from around 3-5 minutes per document to just 5-15 seconds. As a result, Citadele Banka can now process 10,000–12,000 documents per month via the AI-powered document intelligence platform, achieving a 4x increase in monthly processing volume over the past year—and the platform has a 99.6% accuracy rate.

According to Keziks, “One of the biggest success stories for us is the AI-powered document intelligence platform. Break-even for each project or document type we implement is usually achieved in 2–3 months. Incredible.”

The AI-powered document intelligence platform continues to scale across the organization, with new document types being onboarded monthly, further expanding its usage and impact.

Overall, Citadele Banka reported that the platform delivered an ROI within around two months for each newly implemented document type—demonstrating the huge cost reductions that are possible from automating high-volume manual tasks.

Digital Fridays and AI club 

Citadele Banka recognizes that a digitally literate workforce is essential to its future and the ongoing adoption of AI. To that end, it is investing in training and development to help its people become “AI-Augmented by Default”.

One example is ‘Digital Fridays’—an internal event that focuses on digital learning, innovation, and the practical use of technology in daily work. On average, Digital Fridays attract 250–450 participants and help employees understand how new tools, automation, and AI can improve efficiency, collaboration, and ways of working. Topics usually include digital tool updates, GenAI adoption, Microsoft collaboration tools, IT support improvements, and real-life examples of how technology can support work across the bank.

‘AI Club’ is a separate initiative organized by Citadele Banka’s People and Culture team, with around 200–250 members. Dedicated to learning and practical application of artificial intelligence, AI Club builds AI awareness and skills among Citadele Banka’s employees and demonstrates how AI can support productivity, analysis, and smarter decision-making. Topics include AI fundamentals, Copilot capabilities, practical AI use cases in banking, demos, workshops, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Positive results, positive people

As an enthusiastic early adopter of AI, Citadele Banka has helped its people significantly reduce the time they spend on manual processes, freeing them to focus on higher-value work and supporting them to deliver excellent customer service.

By encouraging employees to experiment with AI and providing the training needed to fully leverage its potential, Citadele Banka has not only improved how it serves customers but also observed a positive cultural shift within its workforce.

Characterized by increased curiosity, the democratization of expertise, and a realization that AI adoption is less about technology than about helping people manage change, Citadele Banka is using AI to create a smarter, sharper business for all its stakeholders.

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