Hong Leong Bank is future-proofing its operations by deploying Gemini for Google Workspace across its 12,000 employees. By integrating AI into daily workflows, the bank has accelerated market research, streamlined knowledge retrieval from thousands of internal documents, and boosted call center efficiency by 20%.
Hong Leong Bank (HLB) is a leading, digitally-driven Malaysian financial institution with a 120-year heritage. It provides comprehensive banking services across Asia, including Singapore, Vietnam, and China.
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Malaysia
Hong Leong Bank is future-proofing its operations by deploying Gemini for Google Workspace across its 12,000 employees. By integrating AI into daily workflows, the bank has accelerated market research, streamlined knowledge retrieval from thousands of internal documents, and boosted call center efficiency by 20%.
Google Workspace Results
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Accelerates market research and campaign ideation with Gemini
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Instant knowledge retrieval from high volume SOPs and policy data with
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Consolidates 100+ decentralized Google into a single, natural language search with
A 120 year old bank, HLB continues to stay relevant. In recent years, the bank has made AI a major focus in improving the way it serves customers, and transforming the way employees work. HLB builds an AI-ready organization by training its employees about AI and empowering them with tools such as equipped with capabilities. The bank also inspires employees to integrate AI into daily work through initiatives such as AI Ignite, where AI champions share AI-driven solutions.
The commitment to transformation started years ago. HLB strategically deployed Google Workspace bank-wide in 2019, which proved crucial for collaboration during the pandemic, allowing employees, customers, and partners to stay connected. Tools like supported strong employee engagements through virtual meetings, while shared documents in and kept everyone working on the same page.
Building on this digital foundation, HLB further enabled all 12,000 employees with AI by deploying Gemini in 2025, with the assistance from Google Cloud Partner . Employees, who were already using Google Workspace on a daily basis, welcomed the addition of Gemini to improve their work processes. This integration helps employees with tasks such as summarizing meetings, improving knowledge bases, generating content, freeing them to focus on customer relationships and strategic advice.
This commitment is championed at an executive level. "As a bank, we embrace a culture of innovation, which is also our Bank's value. Amidst dynamic market conditions, we're evolving with AI to enrich employee growth and support customers," said William Streitberg, CITO at Hong Leong Bank. "By working smarter with Google Workspace and Gemini, we can build new capabilities and serve more customers."
Improving productivity across the organization with Gemini
“As a bank, we embrace a culture of innovation. Amidst dynamic market conditions, we're evolving with AI to enrich employee growth and support customers. By working smarter with Google Workspace and Gemini, we can build new capabilities and serve more customers.”
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.
Improving the creative process and knowledge-sharing
“To scale customer service for exponential growth, we're deploying a dual AI strategy. Externally, AI-powered chatbots automate routine queries. Internally, we're leveraging Vertex AI to revolutionize our search, giving agents instant, expert-level information to resolve complex questions.”
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 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 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.