As data becomes the backbone of modern banking, generative AI is emerging as a powerful revenue and efficiency engine. Banks are leveraging vast data repositories not only for fraud detection, credit scoring and customer service, but also to boost revenues by 6% to 20% over the next 2 years. As GenAI moves from pilots to enterprise-wide deployment, it is helping lenders improve efficiency ratios by up to 15 percentage points, strengthening topline growth.
Axis Bank, India’s 3rd-largest private sector lender with a market capitalisation of ₹4.14 Lakh Cr, is embedding AI as a core structural pillar rather than a side initiative. In an interaction with a digital media platform, Prasad Lad, Executive Vice-President and head of the Business Intelligence Unit (BIU), explained the bank’s AI preparation, impact assessment and human adoption strategy. “We believe that if we get this transformation right, we’ll reach a place where we will not need makers, but the checkers won’t go away,” Lad said, referring to humans-in-the-loop oversight.
The broader Indian banking sector recorded 14% growth in FY25, with assets at ₹312.2 Lakh Cr, deposits at ₹231.90 Lakh Cr and credit at ₹181.34 Lakh Cr. Gross bad debt declined to 2.31%, supported by digital adoption through UPI and improved asset quality. Within Axis Bank, the BIU anchors the AI strategy through 5 subunits: data engineering, data science, business analytics, reporting analytics and data governance. Around 6 months ago, the bank established an Enterprise AI CoE to unify direction. “We realised that we needed somebody to own this and pull all of us together,” Lad said.
Axis structures its 3-petabyte data landscape into 3 layers: core structured transaction data, internal unstructured data such as PDFs and voice recordings and external regulatory data. “If your data is not well organised, AI will never be able to figure out what is happening,” Lad noted. The bank has spent 3 years reorganising data, though the semantic layer still needs refinement. To avoid vendor lock-in, Axis runs a democratised AI platform that tests multiple Large Language Models alongside Small Language Models and banking-specific models.
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