Capital One Finds Ways To Make Its Digital Assistant More Proactive

Voice recognition with smart phone. Getty

Artificial intelligence assistants are no longer just the domain of Amazon and Apple. Some of the nation’s largest banks and credit card companies are luring millions of users their way thanks to their own in-house Alexa.

They may not be household names yet, but if Capital One has a say, Eno, its AI assistant, could be in the not too distant future. The reason: Capital One’s AI, which it launched in March of 2017, is heavy on machine learning, enabling the chatbot to identify problems customers may not realize they have.

“Eno is an assistant that is both reactive and proactive,” said Ken Dodelin, vice president of conversational AI at Capital One. “People love it when you can talk to an AI assistant to get an answer and love it even more if the AI assistant detects an issue and helps resolve the stressor.”

Take its customers’ charitable donations as one example of what Eno can do. According to Dodelin, the digital assistant proactively identified close to $2 billion in charitable contributions that could be eligible for tax deductions. ENO poured over credit card transactions for the year and then sent more than ten million customers an email summarizing their personalized charitable donations for 2019.

Its free trial feature, which it rolled out in the fall, is another example of how Capital One is building a proactive chatbot. The service prevents customers from getting charged for a free trial they forgot to cancel. Eno detects when a customer begins a free trial and will proactively reach out to the customer when the trial is nearing completion. Eno will provide the merchant name, trial length and a link to take acton. That saves the customer time in searching for a way to cancel the subscription or membership and saves the customer money. “It’s a little relief from all the cognitive overload,” said the Capital One executive. “Here’s one less thing you have to worry about.”

Capital One is not unique in offering customers access to a digital AI assistant. It’s among a growing list of the major financial services companies that are pouring investment dollars into creating digital assistants that will hopefully become as popular as Alexa. They understand the world is getting more digital and that AI-powered assistants are becoming a bigger part of everyday life.

Traditional financial services companies are also competing against fintechs, which have the latest and greatest in technology and are siphoning off customers at worrying rates.

Despite the fintech competition some of the big banks offerings are thriving as well. Bank of America is one success story. As of December, it had more than 10 million users for Erica, it’s AI assistant. Capital One wouldn’t disclose the number of customers using Eno, but Dodelin said he expects it to grow as more services and features are added to its AI assistant. “It’s both defensive and offensive,” Dodelin said of Capital One’s digital assistant expansion. “We believe that money is hard and it's complicated and everybody likes to have an assistant help them out. We find this to be a differentiator.”

Form:forbes.com