Organizational capability · Banco Ciudad
AI Center of Excellence
How an AI capability gets built inside a bank, with a roadmap, agents in production, and a return conversation.
- Period
- 2024 → today
- Role
- Led it as Head of the AI Center of Excellence
A center of excellence isn't a team that knows a technology. It's the place where you decide where to apply it, what criteria to use to prioritize, and how what's an experiment today becomes something the rest of the company can use tomorrow without asking permission.
«We defined a clear strategy with Microsoft 365 Copilot to make productivity more efficient, we also brought in Copilot Studio to develop specific agents, and we scaled with solutions on Microsoft Azure. This structure let us roll out an organized, effective roadmap to integrate AI at every level of the bank.»
Architecture first, then the use cases
The core decision was defining three layers before building: productivity for everyone, specific agents for concrete processes, and a platform for whatever needs to scale. Without that definition, each area solves it on its own, and six months later there are ten solutions that don't fit together. The cost of that missing definition isn't visible at first: it's paid later, when everything has to be integrated.
What came out of it
The conversation you have to be able to have
«Today, with the same team and more solutions, we’re generating a return seven times greater than the cost.»
That sentence is the whole point. An AI initiative that can't be explained in terms of cost, return, and scale doesn't reach the board, and what doesn't reach the board doesn't get funded past the first burst of enthusiasm. Translating the technology into that language isn't internal marketing: it's the condition for the transformation to outlast one budget cycle.
It also doesn't hold up without support from leadership. A new capability cuts across areas that don't report to the same person, and without someone above holding the priority, every intersection turns into a negotiation.
External recognition
In 2025 the bank was recognized as an Agent of Change for its innovative use of artificial intelligence. The value of a recognition like that isn't the award itself: it's that someone outside, looking at many organizations at once, reached the same conclusion we did about what was happening inside.