Brazil's Itaú Is Rolling Out Generative AI Toward Its Entire Customer Base!

Hi everyone, it's Shiichan! Today I'm bringing you a story about how the Brazilian bank Itaú is rolling out generative AI!

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

OpenAI's News published a case study on Itaú. It features two things: "ia.i", a conversational interface for customers, and "IARA", an internal platform for using models under governance.

Based on what Itaú's CTO, Carlos Eduardo Mazzei, describes, the bank is applying its AI First strategy to both customers and employees.

Why it matters

Banking is a heavily regulated sector, so moving fast and staying in control have to go together. What makes this case interesting is how that balance was actually designed.

Here is the background, from a study by Itaú and Grupo Consumoteca:

• 80% of Brazilians want to organize their financial lives better
• 65% would like technologies that act as a financial copilot, giving ongoing guidance

What changes

For customers, checking accounts, credit, cards, insurance and more come together in one conversation, by text or voice. Human specialists are still there when needed.

Employees benefit too. The same AI layer supports specialists, managers and customer service teams with things like:

• Summaries before meetings
• Meeting preparation
• Understanding a specific issue
• Developing plans and alternatives that used to be time-consuming

Itaú's expectations are three times more time for customer relationships, service up to twice as fast, and conversations up to three times more effective. Note that these are expectations, not measured results.

Dive Deep

ia.i

The first Inteligência Itaú capabilities arrived in 2024, and ia.i is the next stage. It rests on three principles:

• Interactivity
• Multimodality (text, voice, image and clicks in one experience)
• Individualization

At its center is "Customer DNA", a layer of financial context that helps the bank understand the needs, habits and life stages of about 70 million customers. Under governance and responsible AI controls, GPT models are among the components that maintain and enrich it. The results summary says GPT‑5.x models are part of Customer DNA.

Itaú uses a range of models rather than just one. That covers simple cases that need to be cheap and low-latency, as well as complex ones that need reasoning and grounding, all in a single product.

The first phase covered about 300,000 customers. It reaches from questions about an account statement to investment advice and transactions on WhatsApp.

IARA

IARA is a governance and orchestration platform that Itaú built. It gives teams controlled access to different models in line with internal policies, and OpenAI is one of the model providers available there.

It tackles three problems at once:

• Cost control per token
• Accuracy of responses
• Applying responsible AI policies

One example is the legal department, where the platform automates reading, analyzing and interpreting documents:

• A repository of more than 90 million documents
• More than 2 million tasks per month
• Efficiency gains of 20% to 80% in stages of the department's processes

Next steps

Itaú expects to make ia.i available to its entire customer base by the end of 2026. Planned capabilities include product simulations and sign-ups, plus recurring financial analyses of income, expenses and habits.

Wrap-up

• ia.i brings everyday money tasks into one conversation by text or voice
• IARA adds governance, observability and per-token cost control across multiple models
• In legal, 90 million+ documents and 2 million+ tasks a month yield 20% to 80% efficiency gains
• The lessons: choose a range of models, and build the governance layer before scaling

If you design AI platforms for regulated industries, or are planning internal AI use, this one is for you!