The Canadian generative AI pilots are designed to support colleagues in the Bank's contact centres and engineering practice

TORONTO, May 16, 2024 /CNW/ - As generative AI continues to transform how businesses operate, TD Bank Group (TD) today announced two pilots to support more streamlined customer experiences in its contact centres and accelerate the coding workflow for its engineers.

"Generative AI is transformative; its potential to revolutionize how we deliver for our colleagues and customers is incredible," said Luke Gee, Head of AI and Analytics at TD. "Our early exploration of generative AI is an evolution of our ongoing AI strategy. Through Layer 6, our AI research and development centre, we've developed a deep understanding of the technology that we intend to leverage to help support our customers, colleagues and communities now and into the future."

Delivering enhanced customer experiences in TD contact centres

When contact centre colleagues require support to answer a customer inquiry, they seek the advice of supervisory support teams. This process can lead to longer hold times. TD developed a generative AI virtual assistant that, once implemented, is designed to help contact centre colleagues retrieve answers to these day-to-day banking inquiries in seconds, resolving them in a shorter amount of time.

Layer 6 helped develop the generative AI virtual assistant and train it alongside colleagues with a deep understanding of TD policies and procedures. The generative AI virtual assistant provides summarized responses using conversational language to contact centre colleagues, including links to the TD policies and procedures used to source its answers. Colleagues can reference them and complete the necessary next steps to answer customer inquiries faster.

The introduction of large language models (LLMs) in contact centres has already proven to be impactful, according to a 2023 Stanford and MIT study. The study found that one Fortune 500 software firm's contact centre saw a 14% increase, on average, in the number of customer issues resolved per hour. The technology had the greatest impact among novice workers, who were able to solve 35% more customer issues per hour.

The Bank is testing the generative AI virtual assistant with front-line contact centre colleagues this year.

Accelerating the pace of software development for TD engineers

To augment the work of its engineers, TD launched a pilot for GitHub Copilot, a generative AI programming assistant developed by Microsoft.

GitHub Copilot is designed to help streamline simple tasks and accelerate code development. Users can prompt Copilot in natural language to get responses to coding questions, explanations of complex coding topics, suggestions for security recommendations, and more.

At TD, GitHub Copilot is assisting engineers by analyzing the code they're writing and providing real-time suggestions for completing and testing it. With additional time, TD engineers can focus on tasks that require more expertise and provide greater value to the Bank. The platform also enables a more efficient developer experience by helping engineers develop maintainable code.   

"We expect that generative AI is going play an important role in how we evolve our engineering function and culture at TD," said Licenia Rojas, Senior Vice President, Chief Engineer and Architect at TD. "We are taking a thoughtful approach that prioritizes security to help protect our customers and business. By implementing solutions such as GitHub Copilot, we're helping empower our talented engineers to focus on new opportunities and demonstrating our commitment to delivering a positive engineering experience and to developing the best technology talent in the industry."

Between September and December 2023, TD launched a pilot among a select group of engineers, who tested GitHub Copilot to help develop unit testing code. In a survey of colleagues who participated in the test, TD found:

• 50% of engineers surveyed said GitHub Copilot could save them up to 20 hours over a two-week sprint.
• 93% of data engineers surveyed said they were equally or more productive with the help of GitHub Copilot
• 75% of engineers surveyed said it was easy to integrate GitHub Copilot into their everyday work.

Both the contact centre and the engineering pilots were developed through TD Invent, the Bank's enterprise approach to innovation. Within this approach, TD explores how emerging technologies like generative AI and spatial computing can be used to address real challenges before reviewing their potential to be scaled. Today, the Bank has a robust innovation pipeline, spanning across multiple lines of business.

"Through TD Invent, every line of business at TD is working together to understand how we can operationalize emerging technologies to get them to our customers and colleagues quicker and help shape the future of banking, " said Imran Khan, Head of TD Invent. "With generative AI, we have a real opportunity to create experiences that are more personalized, insightful and productive."

Today's announcement is part of TD Tech and Innovation Day, an annual event showcasing the Bank's unique technology and innovation story. This year's theme is Human-Centered Innovation which highlights the people behind our innovation and the customers, colleagues and communities we innovate for. 

About TD Invent

TD Invent drives innovation at the Bank. Through our three areas of focus— Colleague Ideation, Human-Centered Design and Innovation Acceleration —we work across our innovation ecosystem to help meet the evolving needs of our customers, colleagues and communities, accelerating future growth opportunities. To learn more about how we're helping to shape the future of banking at TD, visit tdinvent.td.com.

About TD Bank Group

The Toronto-Dominion Bank and its subsidiaries are collectively known as TD Bank Group ("TD" or the "Bank"). TD is the sixth largest bank in North America by assets and serves over 27.5 million customers in four key businesses operating in a number of locations in financial centres around the globe: Canadian Personal and Commercial Banking, including TD Canada Trust and TD Auto Finance Canada; U.S. Retail, including TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank®, TD Auto Finance U.S., TD Wealth (U.S.), and an investment in The Charles Schwab Corporation; Wealth Management and Insurance, including TD Wealth (Canada), TD Direct Investing, and TD Insurance; and Wholesale Banking, including TD Securities and TD Cowen. TD also ranks among the world's leading online financial services firms, with more than 17 million active online and mobile customers. TD had $1.91 trillion in assets on January 31, 2024. The Toronto-Dominion Bank trades under the symbol "TD" on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges.

SOURCE TD Bank Group