Expanding Andi With the Andi Copilot Early Adopter Program

Andi Copilot is the industry’s first copilot purpose-built for bankers, originally developed in 2017 as an embedded virtual assistant within PrecisionLender and now delivered across Q2’s product portfolio. 

With the Andi Copilot Early Adopter (EA) Program, we’re exploring new capabilities, like the inclusion of Generative AI (GenAI), that will power future generations of Andi Copilot and change the way bankers work forever. You’ll get a front-row seat into how a next-generation product is developed, from the early testing phase all the way through to an early access rollout.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will chronicle our Andi Copilot EA program and keep you up to date on Q2’s AI strategy.

Andi’s Origin Story: Green Means Go

The story of Andi begins with PrecisionLender, a market leader in loan pricing and profitability software for commercial banking that Q2 acquired in 2019. When PrecisionLender was launched, it was designed with a simple principle: Green means go. We sprinkled green dots around the application to indicate where there was potential to improve opportunities. Our hope was to provide the answers before the user ever needed to ask the questions.

Then, we met Andy Max. Andy was the administrator of the Q2 solution at his financial institution, which put him at the center of all pricing decisions. He was proactive in his advice to relationship managers (RMs) and always had a sense for what decisions would lead to more scrutiny and where RMs might run into trouble when structuring a deal. Like his coworkers, we also often relied on Andy for best practice advice. We asked ourselves, “How can we give every relationship manager using our solution their own version of Andy Max?”

Fortunately, at that time – 2017 - artificial intelligence and language models were becoming more accurate and accessible. Thus, Andi was born. We took our initial attempt at “green means go” and combined it with expertise from people like Andy Max to create an in-app coaching assistant. Our goal was to help users make better decisions faster.

Our pricing tool has always generated an enormous amount of data. PrecisionLender started using Andi to derive insights that produced a big impact, and then delivered them to the right person at the right time. We generated insights through Andi and put control over them in the hands of our customers via Andi Skills. 

As we expanded Andi’s capabilities, we realized there was an opportunity to bring the coaching platform to other places. We’ve since expanded Andi beyond relationship pricing, developing the Andi Copilot platform to deliver copilots across our Q2 portfolio, with products such as Centrix. 

Exploring the Andi Copilot Early Adopter Program

Today we are excited to introduce the Andi Copilot Early Adopter Program. The EA program provides early customer access to innovative product capabilities and features. During this phase Q2 works closely with customers to ensure that new technologies, skills, and capabilities — like GenAI — are fit to serve intended FI use cases.

In our current Andi Copilot EA program exploration of GenAI, dozens of commercial relationship managers (RMs) will be using our GenAI-powered solution in their daily work. The feedback we gather with the EA program will help us: Determine the true value a GenAI-powered Andi Copilot can deliver; identify where we can make additional improvements; and discover other contexts in which this new technology would be valuable. 

The first set of GenAI-powered use cases we have identified are in the commercial loan origination and maintenance space.

Why Loan Origination?

We conducted a set of interviews with dozens of commercial bankers working at our clients’ institutions to identify areas where GenAI could make a strong impact. It became apparent that reducing the time RMs currently spend on clerical and administrative tasks - estimated to be 40-60% of their work hours – would bring material productivity and efficiency gains. When RMs are freed from low-value work, they can instead focus on building profitable relationships and generating new deals for the bank. In other words, we want humans to spend their time doing the kind of work that they are uniquely qualified to do.

To create those productivity gains, here are some of the capabilities Q2 will be testing:

• Accuracy/Consistency Check:  Assist with the review process of Credit Memos and Loan Agreements. This process is very labor intensive and requires review by several deal team members.
• Data Search: Help collect data necessary to build a Credit Memo. This data is often in a variety of systems or documents.
• Credit Validation/Loan Governance:  Support the process of governance across several loans. For example, listing all the exceptions on credit memos approved each week. 

The Value of Using GenAI in Andi Copilot

Generative AI allows us to build Andi Copilot Skills that can greatly increase the functionality of the Andi Copilot platform. There is a lot of emphasis on the chat capabilities offered by Large Language Models (LLMs). But for Andi Copilot, the capabilities to structure unstructured data, to execute complex workflows and to summarize data are far more important. That’s what allows Andi Copilot to bring a lot of efficiency gains to bankers. 

Come along with us on this exciting journey to develop the next generation of bank-centric tools. To learn more about the Andi Copilot Early Adopter program and how your institution can get involved, just fill out this form and we’ll be in touch!