RBC Expects to Gain Over $700 Million of Enterprise Value From AI

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is on track to meet its target of $700 million to $1 billion of enterprise value from artificial intelligence by 2027, according to RBC President and CEO Dave McKay.

“Importantly, our target is net of investments, including building on investments already made in data storage, GPU clusters, proprietary LLMs, risk governance and in people,” McKay said Wednesday (Dec. 3) during the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

RBC measures the enterprise value generated from AI by the annualized exit run-rate benefit in revenue, cost avoidance, expense savings, fraud reduction and lower cost of risk, net of investments, according to a strategic update released Wednesday. It said this enterprise value is incremental from fiscal 2024.

The bank announced its target for enterprise value generated by AI during an investor day event in March, saying the benefits delivered by the technology would include developer productivity, upskilled advisors and personalized and higher client engagement.

RBC’s AI capabilities include its Lumina platform that collects and curates business events and analyzes transactions, its proprietary foundation model ATOM that was trained on large-scale financial datasets and is used to develop innovative solutions, its generative AI that supports call center advisors, and its Aiden platform that powers document preparation and summarization as well as other tasks for its Capital Markets business.

McKay said during Wednesday’s earnings call that RBC can build and implement machine and reinforcement learning models, can build and deploy generative AI models, and has partnered with firms like Nvidia to accelerate its agentic AI strategy.

“We’re also implementing key initiatives across our businesses, including reimagining mortgages and workflows for our commercial, corporate and investment banking teams,” McKay said.

“We’re also leveraging AI to build the technology platform of the future, showing early results in enhanced security to protect the bank and clients, technology operations, and AI-enabled developer productivity,” McKay said. “This includes the development of over 5 million lines of code, over 55,000 code reviews and over 3,000 test suites.”

“RBC Assist, our internal AI tool, has been launched to over 30,000 employees across front office and functional roles, enabling employees to be more productive in their day-to-day work,” McKay said.