🏦 Citi Just Trained an Army of AI-Savvy Bankers (and Nobody Got Replaced... Yet)

While most big companies still treat AI like an office side hustle — a few nerds in one corner “experimenting” with chatbots — Citi Bank went all in.

Over the past two years, they’ve turned 4,000 employees into “AI Champions” and rolled out firm-approved AI tools to over 70% of their 182,000 workers. That’s a lot of people pretending they totally understand prompt engineering.

Instead of locking AI inside an innovation lab, Citi decided everyone should get a shot at using it — kind of like Oprah handing out chatbots: “You get AI! You get AI!”

The bank offered training badges (no raises, just bragging rights) and had employees help each other learn on the job. The result? AI became part of everyday work — summarizing reports, drafting notes, and quietly saving everyone from writing one more “per my last email.”

Citi’s approach also came with guardrails — only firm-approved tools, no rogue ChatGPT experiments with client data, thank you very much.

The big idea here: AI adoption doesn’t need a thousand data scientists; it just needs thousands of curious people who know how to use it responsibly.

Instead of asking how AI could “change the future of banking,” Citi asked the far more practical question:

“Can it make all this paperwork slightly less painful?”

Turns out, yes. And that might be the smartest thing any bank’s done with AI so far.

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