How Itaú is building generative AI for its entire customer base

Creating a close, personalized experience for millions of customers in a country like Brazil is, first and foremost, a question of simplicity rather than of models.

“Much of it is about making something simple, direct, and useful, delivering a direct benefit to the customer, and making the technology almost unnoticeable,” says Carlos Eduardo Mazzei, CTO of Itaú.

The standard he describes is demanding: the solution must solve a real everyday problem and be direct, simple, and memorable. Technology serves as the means, never as the centerpiece of the experience.

There is demand for this. A study by Itaú in partnership with Grupo Consumoteca shows that 80% of Brazilians want to better organize their financial lives and seek more effective support for decisions, and that 65% would like technologies that act as a financial copilot, providing ongoing guidance.

The journey began in 2024, when the bank introduced the first Inteligência Itaú capabilities for specific financial needs. ia.i is the next stage: a complete conversational layer, activated by text or voice, bringing interactions related to checking accounts, credit, cards, insurance, and other services into one environment — and connecting customers to specialized human support whenever needed.

“OpenAI’s models were very important in delivering this experience, because they were able to operate across this range of solutions,” Mazzei explains. “From the simplest ones, which need to be efficient in cost and latency, to more complex solutions, where reasoning and all the necessary grounding are required to provide an appropriate answer.”

Having a range of models — rather than a single model — made it possible to deliver the complete solution in one product. At the center of this experience is Customer DNA, a layer of financial context that helps the bank understand the needs, habits, and life stages of approximately 70 million customers. Under governance and responsible AI controls, GPT models are among the components that help maintain and enrich this representation, making interactions progressively more relevant.

The solution rests on three principles: interactivity, multimodality — text, voice, image, and clicks in the same experience — and individualization.