Citi looks to AI to help bosses write performance reviews

Citigroup is rapidly expanding the ways staffers can use artificial intelligence as CEO Jane Fraser continues to hunt for ways to improve efficiency across the firm.

The firm has seen AI technology perform coding work that used to take top developers a week and a half to do in just minutes, Fraser said during a panel at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh.

"There are ways to make it popular with your organization by eliminating some of the greatly dreaded annual processes you have," Fraser said. "I think I heard the cheer around our firm globally when we told everybody that they would be able to do the performance reviews — the AI tool we have will do the first draft of them."

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Citigroup and many of its top rivals are turning to AI to improve in a variety of areas, including credit decisions, marketing and customer service. The Wall Street giant said earlier this month that its generative AI tools have saved 100,000 developer hours per week with automated code reviews — an amount it would take 2,500 developers to do in a normal 40-hour work week.

Fraser, sitting alongside other finance heavyweights including Barclays CEO CS Venkatakrishnan and Standard Chartered's Bill Winters, likened Citigroup's embrace of AI to the advent of the dishwasher.

"When you wash dishes by hand, it's one process — the dishwasher results in a clean plate, but the way it washes the dish is completely different," she said. Citigroup, she said, is asking itself, "How do we get our teams to look at a process end to end and completely reimagine how they've done it manually in the past to now?"

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Venkatakrishnan said his firm is using artificial intelligence to automate many stages of the credit underwriting process for smaller loans.

"Then there are very large decisions, which require the more fundamental issues of client selection," he said. "I think that's going to be human for a while yet."

Earlier on Tuesday, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon agreed AI would likely replace and change some jobs, but said humans will continue to perform critical, client-facing roles.

"You can't teach relationship-building, trust, advice-giving," he said.