BMO's AI Agent Assist Targets 20-30% Faster Credit Card Calls

BMO wants to cut credit card inquiry resolution times by 20–30% and automatically process roughly 40% of eligible refund requests through a new AI assistant it announced on November 6, 2026.

The tool, called AI Agent Assist, supports employees at BMO's Virtual Connect contact centre who handle Canadian clients' credit card transaction inquiries. The stakes are concrete: Virtual Connect takes more than 500,000 such calls each year, and each one currently averages 12–14 minutes to resolve. Both targets apply only to eligible interactions, and BMO frames them as objectives — not reported contact-centre results.

That's the fine print worth holding onto before reading any headline numbers.

What does the assistant actually do?

AI Agent Assist targets the preparation work inside employee-assisted calls. It combines three functions:

• AI-enabled transaction matching
• Policy retrieval
• Case preparation for employee review

The point is consolidation. BMO says the workflow should reduce searches across systems, cut manual tasks and limit the need to place clients on hold while staff navigate those systems. Bringing information and guidance to the point of use is also meant to speed responses and keep service consistent.

For clients, one conditional upside stands out: on qualifying inquiries, BMO says clients could receive their credit as soon as the same day. That's faster refund processing for eligible cases, not a universal turnaround promise.

The design follows a human-in-the-loop principle. Employees stay accountable for reviewing AI-generated information and making servicing decisions. The technology gathers and prepares; people decide.

Who's behind it, and why reuse matters

Greg Brown, BMO's Head of Enterprise AI Transformation and Chief Digital Officer for Personal and Business Banking Canada, frames the deployment as a shift from isolated pilots to AI at scale, with clear guardrails and people accountable for every decision. Brown also tied the approach to protections and oversight as AI agents take a growing role in financial services. Security, privacy and human oversight are central to BMO's method, the bank says, as it builds its own capabilities.

The contact centre is a testing ground. BMO is designing the capabilities behind AI Agent Assist for reuse across other client experiences and business processes. In plain terms: the 500,000-call centre is the high-volume venue where the bank proves components it intends to carry into later agentic AI applications.

How it fits the $1 billion AI goal

The deployment supports BMO's enterprise-wide goal of generating more than $1 billion in AI-enabled revenue growth, productivity improvements and operating efficiencies by 2030. That figure covers the bank's broader AI ambition — not a value assigned to AI Agent Assist alone.

The immediate test is narrower: can AI-supported case preparation shorten eligible calls and automate some refund requests while employees keep responsibility for decisions? Because the capabilities are built for reuse, the answer will shape whether BMO can push the same model into other processes without letting oversight slip.