Around 440 employees from all the countries in which the bank operates put their skills to the test by taking on 12 large language model challenges spread across various blocks.

The staff participating in the trials were tasked with, among other things, processing quantitative information, finding anomalies in financial reports or identifying, scoring and classifying the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a fictitious customer based on their comments. At the end of each checkpoint, the participants received feedback on what kind of prompts or commands they should have entered in order to successfully complete the challenge.

Curro Maturana, global head of GenAI at BBVA says the bank has launched several exploratory projects in recent months to test the waters and gauge the potential of generative artificial intelligence in making organisational processes more efficient and generating additional added value for its customers.

“Generative AI is here to stay,” he says, “and it has enormous potential for businesses as they revolutionise their internal processes and embrace global development projects that will allow them to deploy their products and services simultaneously in different countries."

He says BBVA will take the learnings from the programme to run generative AI courses as part of its in-house Data University staff training program.

The DataRally winners came from across the bank's global network. Carlos Gutiérrez, data specialist at the Global Talent & Culture area, Joel de la Cruz, data scientist of the Advanced Analytics Engineering team at BBVA Spain, and Hans Hidalgo, also a data scientist of Client Solutions at BBVA Peru, posted the highest scores by overcoming all the challenges with the fewest prompts and in the shortest time.

“We couldn’t be happier with the response to the competition, which has been enthusiastic and led to healthy levels of competition,” remarks Josep Amorós, data manager at BBVA and organiser of the DataRally. “75 percent of the participants were very satisfied with the experience and more than 95 percent would do it again. Many of them were also hugely appreciative of the bank’s efforts to offer them activities and training in Generative AI.”