AIB Search Reinvented: AI-Powered Search Engine to Elevate Customer Experience Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025

In a world where customers increasingly expect instant answers, AIB saw an opportunity to turn a customer pain point into a competitive advantage. With over 1,600 pages of unstructured content, our customers were often left frustrated, unable to find the information they needed. More than 5,000 search queries a week were going unanswered on our website, pushing customers to Google, our call centres—leading to long wait times, increased operational costs, and complaints. It became clear that our outdated search function wasn’t just underperforming—it was actively eroding trust and driving dissatisfaction.

The solution wasn’t just to fix search—it was to reimagine it. To prepare ourselves for the impact on behaviour GPT and Search Generated AI will have we embraced the transformative power of structured data. We partnered with Yext to build an AI-powered search experience tailored to banking. We created a knowledge graph that allows our system to interpret natural language, correct misspellings, understand long-form queries, and surface precise, dynamic answers—whether it’s the nearest ATM, a branch with accessibility features, mortgage rates or cancelling payments. We can now build specific tools on top of this knowledge graph that creates a seamless customer experience. Our Service Finder tool now enables customers to locate the exact service they need based on location and requirements, while redesigned EBS branch pages act as digital business cards, dramatically improving visibility or the AIB Search Bar which is now powered by AI.

What sets this apart is the collaboration across Digital, Marketing, Technology, Customer Experience, Data Analytics, and our external partners. Together, we turned customer frustrations into actionable insights—using search queries and call centre data to identify the top 100 questions customers struggled with and rewriting them in plain English. The results have been transformative: a 300% increase in search engagement, 93% of queries now returning relevant answers, 619 call deflections in just two weeks during a seasonal mobile app registration spike, €48,000 in annual PPC savings, and EBS branch pages now ranking as the 3rd largest lead driver. Try it for yourself. Go to www.aib.ie and you’ll see our prominent search experience.

This project isn’t just a search upgrade; it’s a shift in how we deliver digital customer experience—transforming search from a static, reactive tool into a proactive, intelligent assistant that empowers customers and supports our business strategy for long-term, customer-first innovation.