Citi Opens Up AI Playground for Thousands of Coders to Innovate

Citi is encouraging its army of developers to start experimenting with the bank’s artificial intelligence tools in an ‘AI playground’ built on Google Cloud. The aim is to harness the creativity of thousands of coders to build innovative solutions.

The playground grants Citi coders access to the bank’s growing collection of pre-trained AI models. This includes natural language processing, voice recognition, and more. Developers can tap these tools to create and test new ideas or enhance existing applications.

Citi has over 18,000 developers spread across six global hubs. The playground provides a centralized destination for them to freely learn and innovate with AI across the company. Coders only need access to the bank’s cloud environment on Google to participate.

Unleashing its developer talent on AI represents a strategic move by Citi. The bank wants to democratize AI experimentation to drive breakthroughs in improving products, efficiency, security and other areas.

Citi aims to eventually have over 10,000 developers engaged in the playground. It reflects a key priority of embedding AI throughout the company to enhance operations and better serve customers.

The playground approach follows similar initiatives at other banks to lower barriers to AI adoption. Empowering coders accelerates practical applications versus keeping AI isolated within specialized data science teams.

Citi is optimistic its bottom-up innovation model will lead to impactful AI solutions. Supporting grassroots creativity on top of its enterprise AI investments will help the bank capitalize on the promise of artificial intelligence.

The playground signifies Citi’s all-in embrace of AI as it looks to digitally transform legacy systems and processes. By unleashing its developer army, the bank hopes to gain an AI innovation edge.