United Overseas Bank (UOB) will be trialling the use of Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve the productivity and collaboration of its frontline and back-end functions in a secure manner.
Three hundred employees across the bank’s branches, customer service, technology and operations teams will progressively gain access to the generative AI tool for one year starting this month. They will be supported by a global Center of Excellence and Microsoft Customer Success team.
Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models with business data from users’ calendars, emails, chats, documents, and meetings, as well as Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Teams.
It can effortlessly summarise lengthy documents and email threads on Outlook, transform raw data into visualisations in Excel, or deliver concise meeting summaries on Teams. This will free up UOB employees' time to enable them to focus on higher-impact tasks.
UOB employees can also conveniently locate and reference information within the bank with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The tool can intelligently identify and retrieve relevant data based on the context of the email or documents that employees are working on. This would foster seamless collaboration among employees across different functions, allowing them to build upon each other’s work more easily and meaningfully.
Additionally, Microsoft 365 Copilot can help UOB employees transform existing documents into engaging presentations, make content more concise and suggest suitable tone of voice for messages. As such, the bank will be able to maintain a consistent and compelling voice across marketing materials and responses to customers.
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This trial is part of UOB’s longer-term plans to explore and adopt generative AI technology for meaningful and sustainable business outcomes while ensuring that AI is used in a responsible manner. It will therefore include active employee feedback loops that contribute to a broader generative AI strategy for the whole bank.
“Generative AI has been at the forefront of emerging technologies and we see tremendous potential in integrating it into UOB’s daily operations. In addition to productivity improvements, we hope that this tool can spark creativity and inspire innovation among employees, ultimately further enhancing our customers’ banking experiences,” says Lawrence Goh, chief operating officer and head of Group Infrastructure Platform Services, Group Technology and Operations at UOB.
“Microsoft is pleased to be collaborating with UOB to equip its workforce with generative AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, which we believe will yield an unparalleled agility needed to address changing customer expectations, competitive pressures, and regulatory shifts,” says Lee Hui Li, Microsoft’s Singapore managing director.
