Itaú Rolls Out ia.i AI Financial Assistant to 300,000 Customers in First Phase
Brazil's Itaú has launched ia.i, a single chat window where customers can ask about everything from accounts to insurance, to roughly 300,000 people in its first phase. An internal platform called IARA manages the cost and answer accuracy of multiple AI models.
On October 16 local time, OpenAI published a look at how Brazil’s Itaú bank is using generative AI. Itaú runs two systems: ia.i, a conversational service where customers ask financial questions and get answers, and IARA, an AI management platform for employees. The first phase of ia.i reached roughly 300,000 customers, and the bank aims to extend it to its entire customer base by the end of 2026.
From accounts to insurance, all in one chat window
ia.i is designed to handle inquiries about accounts, credit, cards, and insurance in a single place. Customers start a conversation by text or voice. Within that same conversation, they can also send images or respond by tapping on the screen. When necessary, the system hands the customer off to a specialist representative. The focus is on bundling questions that span multiple financial products into one continuous conversation.
Itaú plans to widen the feature set. It is preparing tools that let customers run simulations on products in advance and sign up for them on the spot. Another planned feature would regularly analyze income, spending, and financial habits and report back to the customer. The idea is to expand from today’s inquiry handling into product sign-ups and personal financial analysis.
How the bank chooses among multiple AI models
Itaú assigns different models depending on the nature of the task. For simple work, cost and response speed come first. For complex work, the bank weighs how much reasoning is needed to arrive at an answer and how much supporting evidence that answer requires. GPT-5.x is among the models that make up Customer DNA, which covers the financial situations of roughly 70 million customers.
IARA manages how employees use these models. It is a platform that helps each team access multiple models in line with the bank’s internal policies. It tracks model usage costs and answer accuracy, monitors operational health, and applies responsible AI policies. OpenAI is one of several model providers available to choose from within IARA.
Using AI in financial work also means managing whether answers are appropriate and whether customer information is protected. Itaú addresses regulatory compliance, bias risk, and the costs that mount as model usage grows. Those requirements are reflected in its structure of running a customer-facing conversational service alongside an internal management platform.
What the results look like so far
On the employee side, the numbers come from the legal department. The legal solution OpenAI highlighted processes more than 2 million tasks per month across a corpus of more than 90 million documents. Efficiency gains of 20 to 80 percent were reported at individual task stages within the legal department.
Figures for the tools that assist customer service representatives are still projections. Itaú said it expects the time employees can spend building relationships with customers to triple, service to be up to 2 times faster, and conversations to be up to 3 times as effective.
What stands out about Itaú’s case is that it pursues two things at once: consolidating customer inquiries in one place and governing how employees use AI. The change customers will feel goes beyond inquiry handling to conducting product sign-ups and regular financial analysis through conversation. The things to watch next are whether the bank meets its target of reaching all customers by the end of 2026, and how far the announced features actually get deployed.