One of the superpowers of ChatGPT is its ability to simplify complex topics, which makes it an excellent educational tool for fledgling workers. SouthState is already seeing a significant productivity boost among its employees. 

ChatGPT is an intern’s new best friend, according to an executive at SouthState Bank who spoke at a recent American Banker conference. The bank trained an enterprise-version of ChatGPT on its own documents, allowing the bot to answer questions about internal information, complete with citations and references.

“As you learn about any new topic, it doesn’t make you an expert, but it takes a below-average person or an average person and ups their game,” exec Chris Nichols said on stage. “We’re just bringing on a bunch of interns this week for our summer intern program and we’re training them first and foremost on how to use our version of ChatGPT in order to quickly become experts at learning about deposits or regulation.” 

This aligns with a recent study that showed how an AI-powered customer service chatbot at a Fortune 500 firm was particularly useful for new agents, who benefited more from automated advice than their more experienced coworkers.  

“It normally takes an employee 12 to 15 minutes to figure out the correct answer,” Nichols said. “That gets reduced to seconds.” 

It cost SouthState about $50,000 to bring the tool to production and about $30,000 a month to test and run. It pays for itself, according to Nichols: “If you have 5,000 employees using it and they’re five to eight times more productive, that $30,000 a month is nothing.” 

For more examples of how GenAI is transforming financial services, read Insights Distilled’s recent report.