OpenAI case study: how Brazil's Itaú runs AI across a regulated bank

In a case study published by OpenAI, Brazilian bank Itaú describes ia.i, a text and voice assistant for accounts, credit, cards and insurance that hands customers to human staff when needed. It reached about 300,000 customers in its first phase, and the bank aims to offer it to all customers by the end of 2026. Behind it sits IARA, an in-house platform that gives the bank's teams controlled access to several model providers, OpenAI among them, with per-token cost tracking, monitoring and responsible AI rules. Itaú says its legal department uses the platform on more than 90 million documents and over 2 million tasks a month, with efficiency gains of 20% to 80% in parts of its processes; these are the bank's figures in a vendor's write-up.