1. Siloed Workflows
Teams are part of a fluid ecosystem with the same goal yet tools are siloed
Sean Hanrahan
Enhancing Employee Productivity with AI at Wells Fargo
Every day, bank employees navigate countless procedures, evolving regulations, and complex banking systems—all while ensuring fast, accurate customer support. To help the frontline and streamline interactions, Wells Fargo built a suite of AI tools including large language models for 35,000 bankers across 4,000 branches.
Why Generative AI is Sparking Wells Fargo’s Next Chapter
Kudos to the Wells Fargo Innovation Center team and forward-thinking business stakeholders from across lines of business who participated in this initiative to meet customer and banker needs and drive innovation across the enterprise.
Impact
I led a top company priority to assess new opportunities for AI deployment, partnering with cross-functional product, design and engineering teams to generate solutions for internal employees to improve productivity and streamline collaboration. Help was needed to define the AI CoE product roadmap and provide engineering teams with guidance around new workflows, features and technology enablement to meet customer and banker needs. This initiative led to new internal tools deployed in 2025 to 35,000 bankers. Wells Fargo plans to soon extend its capabilities with AI and LLMs to additional teams.
35k
bankers can access large language models to locate information they need
30s
cut response time from 10 minutes to just 30 seconds
75%
of all searches take place through the AI agent
3
rounds of user testing to validate new concepts and component library
Key Insights
In-depth interviews with relationship managers and portfolio managers revealed a deep understanding of opportunity areas and pain points
2. Analysis to Anomaly
Teams find critical anomalies and changes, then must create explanations to process deal
3. Tools Take Time
Managers feel lost and overwhelmed when searching for policy and critical resources
4. Consistency is Key
Managers are handicapped by lack of consistency and history; leads to errors
How Might We
Fuse portfolio bankers and relationship managers with intelligent tools to reduce duplicity, identify and clean up errors, focus with prioritization and create simple, intuitive and natural workflows?
Contributions
From discovery to validation. Human-centered design across the product lifecycle
Discovery
Partnered with internal stakeholders, executives and SMEs. Conducted interviews and co-led a 3-day design workshop to discover opportunities and generate early concepts
Strategy & Design
Depicted net new concepts and built custom components in Figma to support existing workflows and extend to Microsoft Teams apps (primary platform for collaborative tasks and file sharing)
Prototyping
Extensive prototyping and rapid iteration with product and engineering teams. Built Microsoft Teams apps, components, and functionality including demos with APIs and LLMs
Positioning
Validated concepts and features with 3 rounds of user testing, then shipped net new component library to engineers with implementation guidance
Images and components included in this case study were created by me. I utilized generative AI tools to depict some visuals. This file contains property of Wells Fargo. Do not copy, upload or share without express permission.