Nikkei Asia reported on the seventeenth that Japan’s three major financial groups have began to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots into their work.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plans to make use of AI chatbots starting this summer with the goal of accelerating productivity by saving employees effort and time in cumbersome paperwork. It applies to tasks reminiscent of drafting loan approval requests or internal inquiries and responses.

In an effort to prevent data leakage, external access is blocked, and contents entered by employees are also excluded from AI training data. After introducing the chatbot, the Mitsubishi Group plans to develop its own customized AI chatbot in cooperation with Microsoft Japan inside this 12 months.

In the long run, it’s a position that it can also review a system that uses an AI chatbot to reply online inquiries from customers.

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group also announced that it has begun testing an AI chatbot for business use developed in partnership with Microsoft Japan. It plans to distribute the tool to all employees this fall.

Sumitomo has AI chatbots answering worker questions based on publicly available information and the bank’s own data. It is anticipated to be useful for business regulation inquiries, document drafting, and customer basic information collection. To stop data leakage, we decided to make use of a non-public network.

Mizuho Financial Group can be planning to introduce an AI chatbot for internal work. We’re reviewing the event of our own chatbot to guard sensitive information.

Jeong Byeong-il, member jbi@aitimes.com