Taking a comprehensive approach, the bank upskills all 12,000 employees and engages them early in the process.

With Gemini, employees can quickly draft emails and streamline joint work on documents and projects. Furthermore, while the bank reinforces engagement through Brown Bag sessions on Meet, being able to generate summaries and transcripts from these sessions automatically means every employee can stay informed and aligned, regardless of meeting attendance.

Beyond everyday productivity, the bank applies Gemini in high-value use cases to streamline creative processes and improve customer-facing functions.

HLB's Marketing and Communications team uses Gemini for enhanced market research and insights, rapid campaign idea generation, and high-quality copywriting, including the creation and refinement of headlines and copy options. The resulting time-savings and efficient preparation of proposals and presentations allows the team to focus on strategic planning.

Internally, the bank shifts to AI to manage knowledge with AI agents that provides instant access to complex policy and domain knowledge.

The Project Steering Committee (PSC) Office and Group Operations, including the Human Resources department, use NotebookLM to master more than 1000 copies of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and policy data. These teams use NotebookLM to rapidly search historical meeting minutes and internal policy documents, fundamentally changing how they retrieve information.

The PSC, for example, uploads everything from meeting minutes to board approvals onto NotebookLM. This ensures that when a user asks a question, they instantly receive the historical context and definitive decision, which reduces internal friction and ensures compliance. Critically, the bank is able to maintain strict data security because NotebookLM does not use the internal sources to train the public model, and all data within a notebook remains private unless the user explicitly shares it.

Where HLB sees the most significant gain in efficiency is in its customer-facing call center, where call center employees use AI to work smarter and faster. HLB's prior knowledge system consisted of more than 100 decentralized Google Sites, each created to organize information across various departments and products for agents answering customer queries.

The Bank uses NotebookLM integrated with Vertex AI Search for dynamic search. This solution allows agents to type natural language questions into a single search bar, bypassing the need to manually sift through multiple documents. NotebookLM can quickly review and securely analyze all relevant information, including PDFs, call transcripts, and product documents, linked across those 100+ sites to provide accurate and reliable answers.

"To scale customer service for exponential growth, we're deploying a dual AI strategy. Externally, AI-powered chatbots automate routine queries," said William Streitberg, CITO at Hong Leong Bank. "Internally, we're leveraging Vertex AI to revolutionize our search, giving agents instant, expert-level information to resolve complex questions."

This AI-powered approach dramatically boosts agent efficiency by 20%, while ensuring data security remains intact.

More than 65% of HLB employees are Gemini active monthly users, uncovering new AI use cases, which directly contributes to the bank's broader success.

HLB's journey with Google Workspace and Gemini showcases a successful digital transformation, replacing traditional productivity tools with AI-powered solutions. With AI embedded in every step of their processes, the bank is able to fundamentally change how its employees work and serve customers across the organization, setting a new path forward as the organization continues to scale.