Brazilian bank Itaú has put its conversational assistant, ia.i, in front of about 300,000 customers in a first phase and aims to reach its entire customer base by the end of 2026, according to a customer story OpenAI published on October 16, 2026. Behind the assistant sits IARA, an internal platform that controls which AI models the bank's teams can use and how.
ia.i works by text or voice and brings checking accounts, credit, cards, insurance and other services into one conversation, with a handover to human specialists when needed. Planned next steps include product simulations, sign-ups and recurring analyses of income, expenses and habits.
The architectural choice is IARA. Itaú describes it as a governance and orchestration platform that gives teams controlled access to different models in line with internal policies, with OpenAI as one of several providers. It tracks cost per token, answer accuracy and responsible AI rules. Think of it as a switchboard: every request passes one point where the bank decides which model answers and what it may see.
The same layer runs internal work. In the legal department, AI reads and analyses a repository of more than 90 million documents and executes more than 2 million tasks a month, with efficiency gains of 20% to 80% in stages of the department's processes. The bank uses a range of models rather than one: fast, low-cost models for simple requests and reasoning models where an answer needs more grounding.
These figures come from a vendor case study, not an independent audit. OpenAI does not say how accuracy is measured or what the 20% to 80% range is compared against.
Why this matters for banks and fund issuers
The useful lesson is the order of work. Itaú built the governance and routing layer before scaling the assistant, so model choice, cost and data access are decided in one place. A bank or fund issuer can apply the same pattern with models on its own servers or a private cloud, keeping documents inside its own boundary (see how LabForty sets up local AI around your boundaries). The next public test for Itaú is whether ia.i reaches its full customer base by the end of 2026 as planned.
