How Europe’s largest bank balances AI speed, sovereignty and model choice
Hybrid AI governance has become essential for regulated industries such as banking, where the pressure to move fast with agentic AI collides with strict requirements for data sovereignty, compliance and model control.
For Europe’s largest bank, AI transformation is not a single cloud migration or a proof-of-concept sprint — it is a multi-year industrialization effort built around governed, deliberate use-case scaling. BNP Paribas SA now has nearly 1,000 of those AI use cases underway across its global operations, with a structured AI factory at the center of its approach, according to Jean-Michel Garcia (pictured), group chief technology officer at BNP Paribas.
“We’ve been working for models and algorithms for a while now, almost 20 years, so it’s not something new,” Garcia said. “[What] came as a surprise two years ago [was] the impact, the scale of the transformation and the fact that in one single new technology, we were able to maybe transform all kinds of business we used to have — all the employee experience, all the customer experience.”
Garcia spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the Think 2026 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed BNP Paribas’s hybrid AI governance strategy, AI factory implementation and balancing speed with data sovereignty. (* Disclosure below.)
