Microsoft supported Bradesco, one of the country’s leading banks, in creating BIA (Bradesco Artificial Intelligence) Tech – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) copilot tailored to the day-to-day needs of developers. The financial institution has a robust innovation strategy and leveraged its AI expertise to create a development-focused solution with code sharing through GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service. These initiatives helped modernize the bank’s internal processes and led to efficiency gains of up to 40% in code writing.
Expanding digital transformation into services used daily by millions of Brazilians is no easy task. To achieve this, Bradesco is leveraging the learnings and innovative DNA that gave rise to BIA—an AI assistant launched in 2016 that revolutionized customer service in Brazil—in its innovation strategy. Since the launch of its AI, which already has generative AI capabilities and enables fast and accurate document generation, it has had nearly 2.5 billion interactions with customers and added a wide range of services, ranging from sending PIX (payment of Brazilian real estate) and paying bills to personalized recommendations for products, services, and investments, as well as alerts in case of suspected fraud in transactions.. Currently, BIA with generative AI is available to 40,000 employees and over 500,000 customers.
“Bradesco has always invested in innovation and was a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in financial services. We’ve had excellent experience with BIA, serving our customers efficiently, and later with BIA Agências, helping our frontline managers deliver better services and consult internal regulations. Therefore, we wanted to once again leverage the full potential of Generative AI to help our developers be more efficient and free up time for more creativity and consultancy,” he explains. Nelson Borges, IT Superintendent at Bradesco.
A BIA (Tech) for developers
With the successful implementation of BIA for both branch employees and external customers, Bradesco is once again advancing its adoption of AI with the creation of BIA Tech, which leverages the full cloud power of Microsoft Azure and large language models from Azure OpenAI Service to address concrete challenges facing the IT team. The first of these was supporting the writing of instructions for development projects.
For a new feature to be introduced, Bradesco’s development team needs to write ‘stories’ with instructions on what developers need to do. With the powerful analysis power of Generative AI, BIA Tech has become a key tool in improving the quality of these instructions, breaking each story into smaller pieces of guidance and highlighting missing elements to make the information clearer. Additionally, the team created a plugin to allow developers to converse in natural language with BIA Tech, integrated with existing tools, and develop the story in a guided manner.
“Everything being planned is based on feedback from Bradesco’s developer teams. Bia Tech already has over 1,500 loyal users (heavy users), and the teams have seen the benefits of working with an AI co-pilot to support developers’ day-to-day activities.”, highlights Nelson.
According to Bradesco’s technical team, BIA Tech not only reduced the most bureaucratic workload of a project but also increased the quality of the stories produced by approximately 46 percentage points, with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10. This success led the bank’s IT team to expand the capabilities of the AI assistant, which can now help assess the risks of a code change, identify potential vulnerabilities, assist with metrics, and more. The expectation is that, in the future, BIA Tech will be expanded to cover all stages of the software development lifecycle.
Still according to Nelson, “the using BIA Tech to evaluate incident solutions brought significant gains such as a 23% reduction in the analysis time of an incident involving the root cause identification stage and the definition of corrective solutions, with an assertiveness of 90% in the suggested solutions”.
BIA Tech com Github
Bradesco is also investing in AI solutions combined with automation that can complement and further improve the efficiency of internal processes, encompassing the entire development chain. In practice, this translates into accelerated time-to-market—the period a product takes from conception to being available for sale in the market—reducing the time required for provisioning and configuring a structure.
The combined solutions from BIA Tech, Github Actions, and Github Copilot have automated code management processes, improving process efficiency, team collaboration, and improving management quality through telemetry and data analysis, all of which contribute to the creation of the bank’s products.
GitHub Copilot currently suggests over 10,000 lines of code per day, with strong developer adoption. These numbers reflect a significant improvement in software development efficiency, with time savings ranging from 30 to 40% per code snippet.
The goal is to empower employees and provide them with tools to replace repetitive tasks with activities that explore their creative and cognitive potential, ensuring the bank remains at the forefront of technological innovation. The implementation of GitHub, GitHub Copilot, and Bia Tech at Bradesco paves the way for the exploration of new technologies and innovations. The bank is also experimenting with other AI and automation solutions that can complement and further enhance its internal processes.
“What we’ve seen is that using AI within the IT solutions cycle can bring significant productivity gains to engineers, whether in solution creation or operations. Our focus for 2025 will be to expand and broaden use cases through open, collaborative, and modern AI architectures with a focus on multi-agent solutions.”, concludes Nelson.
“Generative AI offers unprecedented potential for financial institutions. It supports teams in their day-to-day tasks, generating agility in repetitive processes, supporting technical teams, and facilitating access to internal regulations. This technology is also a key ally in creating assertive, data-driven solutions that meet the specific needs of the bank’s diverse customer profiles.”, comments Joana Moura, vice president for Corporate Clients at Microsoft Brazil.
