DBS Bank: A Tech Company Going All in on AI

The case is set in April 2023, soon after DBS Bank Limited (DBS) reported a 20% net profit growth of US$6.02 billion. The bank’s CEO Piyush Gupta had attributed this growth to the company’s continuing digital transformation journey that had started more than a decade ago. Central to this journey was the bank’s adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to improve and diversify products and services.

To become AI-fuelled, DBS had created a “Data First” culture and hired hundreds of technology professionals to build its technology capabilities. In addition, the bank had set aside substantial budgets to allow for experimentation, motivated individual departments to build and deploy AI-based applications, implemented an automation strategy to guide solution building, and embedded AI into nearly every part of the customer journey.

Prior to the transformation, DBS was sometimes irreverently referred to as ‘Damm Bloody Slow’ due to its poor customer service, but had emerged as a customer-savvy, market-responsive, AI-fuelled company with more successes than failures, diversified lines of business, and dramatic growth in revenues. However, the financial services sector was seeing increased competition due to the entry of purely technology companies like Grab, PayPal, Alibaba, etc. with innovative solutions. How could DBS compete in a rapidly changing banking marketplace? Had the ‘All in on AI’ approach given the bank a competitive advantage? Could DBS’s prior 10 years of successful efforts with digitalisation, analytics and AI position it to take advantage of the newest generation of Generative AI in an accelerated manner?

The case helps students understand: (1) how large traditional companies can adopt AI to help transform and diversify their business (2) how they can create a mind-set change for AI adoption (3) the business benefits of a whole organisation’s AI adoption approach and (4) preparedness required to implement an effective AI-fuelled digital transformation.

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