Absa is doubling down on its AI chat platform, announcing it has signed a new deal with Salesforce to expand its capability. The bank has been working on its digital assistant for a decade, starting in May 2016 with the launch of ChatBanking on Twitter, which allowed customers to check balances and buy airtime using a secure link to their social profile.Since then, the platform has been improved, with Absa now working with Salesforce on the project. This week, Absa announced it has renewed for another three years its long-standing collaboration with the Silicon Valley firm started by Marc Benioff. This will support the bank’s “growing focus on AI, automation and real-time data insights to create more personalised and efficient banking experiences for customers”.All this will be done through the bank’s AI chat agent “Abby”, which now operates on the Absa banking app and website, allowing customers to navigate the platforms through chat interactions as opposed to clicking through pages on the interface. On the bank’s business banking website, the agent can support all 11 of South Africa’s official languages.Read: Absa boss Kenny Fihla appointed chair of Banking Association SAOver the three-year period, the partnership will focus on a number of technologies across the group, including Saleforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud and Loyalty Cloud. AI agents have taken off in popularity worldwide. While Absa has developed the tool over a decade, it is still confined to customer support, queries and navigating the bank’s online portal. It differs from agentic banking that the likes of Visa are pushing. A year ago, Visa, one of the world’s two major players providing card and payments services to all big South African banks, announced a new suite of technologies that will allow AI systems to make payments on behalf of human customers in e-commerce transactions. This is part of a growing trend regarding AI-powered agents, known as agentic AI, taking on more tasks from human beings. For example, an agent that works like a personal assistant — making bookings, creating meetings, summarising notes and other important information.For a bank, this includes AI agents that can handle customer queries, give financial advice, or even approve a credit or loan application.Last year, Johnson Idesoh, group chief information and technology officer at Absa, said the bank was sceptical about giving AI agents such autonomy. This was likely to change in the future, but more testing was needed for the full set of risks to pass the muster of South Africa’s highly regulated and often conservative banking industry. “For now, we’ve taken a stance that we are not going to use these agentic AI solutions to make final decisions,” Idesoh told Business Day. Absa has been a big customer for Salesforce in recent years. The platform is now “deeply embedded” in Absa’s daily operations, with about 15,000 of its employees actively using it across business units, covering frontline teams and back-office operations. “This renewed collaboration [with Salesforce] speaks to Absa’s continued focus on customer-centric, data-driven transformation and enables us to deliver on our promise of bringing possibilities to life for our customers across Africa,” said Thato Matolong, chief information officer for personal & private banking at Absa.