BBVA is giving almost all of its staff access to OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools after expanding its partnership with the technology firm.
The Spanish banking group said its more than 120,000 workers will be able to use ChatGPT Enterprise, following a pilot with 11,000 staff that found it saved three hours per week on routine tasks.
Though the firms did not disclose the terms of the agreement, a standard business plan typically costs $25 per user each month, suggesting a yearly price tag of tens of millions of dollars for a large company.
"With this expansion of our work together, BBVA will embed our AI into the core of their products and operations to enhance the overall banking experience for their customers,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, said in a statement. Engineers at the two firms will work closer together on training AI models for banking use cases.
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, as BBVA is formally known, has more than 1,000 scientists designing and running AI models who work alongside 2,500 data specialists, said Elena Alfaro, the bank’s head of global AI adoption. "With something like this, they will be like super bankers with these capabilities,” she said in an interview.
The firm is also working to add more features to its financial assistant named Blue, which can currently handle 150 queries from customers in Spain and Mexico. The aim is to give the tool the power to carry out transactions independently, an ability known as agentic AI.
"They were an early adopter, had alpha access to GPT-5 before it was launched, and gave us amazing feedback, which actually was incorporated to improve the model,” Matt Weaver, head of solutions engineering for EMEA at OpenAI, said about the bank.
OpenAI, the world’s largest startup with a $500bn valuation, is working to make its technology more useful to businesses such as banks, as it continues to lose money while drawing in new backers from Nvidia Corp to Walt Disney Co. The firm set up a team named Project Mercury, staffed with more than 100 former investment bankers, to help build financial models that could replace the grunt work performed by junior Wall Street staffers, Bloomberg previously reported.
Weaver said "a key part” of the bank tie-up is to generate revenue for the business, with an additional benefit of learning more about what OpenAI’s technology can do. "As we push the frontier of what’s possible with AI towards financial services, but also pharmaceuticals, health-care, life sciences, manufacturing, retail, all of these industries have something to teach us about how our models perform in the real world,” he said.
Last week OpenAI announced its new customers included digital banks Revolut and Allica Bank, which use its technology for fighting financial crime and speeding up business lending, as well as private equity firms EQT and Permira.
For financial services, the technology is a chance to automate more tasks and unlock the industry’s enormous data hordes, although the signs so far are that firms are adding, not cutting, jobs as a result of this push.