Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview 20 representatives at 16 organizations and conduct a Projected Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with the investment in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.1
In the full TEI study, Forrester found that an industry-agnostic composite organization would see risk-adjusted financial benefits ranging between $45.9 million and $197.4 million over three years.
This abstract will focus on the financial services and insurance (FSI) sector’s use of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and its value to their organizations. This sector includes banking, capital markets, and insurance organizations.
As part of the broader TEI study, Forrester interviewed two representatives with direct experience implementing Azure OpenAI Service at FSI organizations:
Like organizations in many other industries, those in the FSI sector strive to understand the exact needs of their clients and customers. This can understandably be challenging when considering the diversity of customer individuality (when thinking of retail banks) or the significance of securing a particular client and its portfolio (when discussing private banks and wealth managers). Forrester research finds that many FSI organizations are struggling to meet the emotional engagement with their existing and prospective clients, which is key to their loyalty.2
Interviewees in the FSI sector said that by leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, their organizations are finding ways to shift responsibilities in information gathering and analysis away from their employees by having their AI-supported intranet searches do this in a faster, more accurate, and more standardized manner. This allows them to dedicate more time to taking action and decide how best to support their clients, both existing and prospective. The ability to personalize each engagement is projected to have direct impact on client experience and by extension business growth.
Improvement in content generation efficiency by Year 3*
10% to 60%
*For the composite organization presented in the full TEI study
The interviewees’ organizations adopted Azure OpenAI Service to optimize and innovate new ways they can engage with their clients. In trying to do so, these organizations struggled with several challenges in their legacy environments, including:
“When you have clients that are CEOs, you want to enhance your services by discussing things like market trends and how that can impact their portfolio. By having our client meetings more efficient, information easily accessible, and content better generated, all this allows us to introduce these extra elements into our engagements.”
Chief architect, bank
The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:
Productivity gain for client support. Interviewees shared that using Azure OpenAI Service boosted the productivity of their organization’s workforce when supporting clients. Whereas previously there were activities that had to be done manually (e.g., recapping meeting notes, building due diligence reports), now that can be a simple request to the internal chatbot that then quickly generates the requested information.
For FSI organizations that have contact center functions, agents can also be supported by this internal chatbots to minimize the time spent per call and ensure that agents have the right information faster:
Efficiency and scalability in GTM content generation. Similarly, where the activity to be supported involved generating content, the workforces at FSI organizations can now benefit from having their internal chatbots generate the requested content containing the right information in the right format.
Interviewees said that in addition to the time savings, this allowed employees to take on higher value work.
The CTO at the investment management firm said: “In our investment group, we use genAI to summarize company and industry information for our analysts. GenAI is doing a huge amount of data consumption for them, can summarize information, and can go back deeper into certain analyses. This is massive in terms of hours saved. Now, even with skipping a lot of the information search and review work that they had to do previously, our analysts can spend more time thinking about the data [and] work around some of the more nebulous relationships that exist between different data sets to really give you the best insight that you need.”
Improved client experience. The direct result of all the efficiencies described before from adopting Azure OpenAI Service in their client engagement processes is improvement in their client experience, mainly because using Azure OpenAI Service allow FSI organizations to gather and organize information in way that is targeted and directly applicable to each client they engage with:
The chief architect at the bank told Forrester: “When we get high net worth clients and we need to do our due diligence on them, [Azure OpenAI Service] helps us pull a lot of that external information quickly. While we do already have existing tools connected to various data sources, [Azure OpenAI Service] supplements our existing infrastructure very well. [In our contact centers,] we can also use [Azure OpenAI Service] to do sentiment analysis to see if, based on their tone, a client or caller is frustrated or angry. Then it would recommend our agents be more empathetic. We believe these things will help improve the overall client experience and metrics such as NPSSM (Net Promoter Score).”
Improvement in average revenue per client by Year 3*
Up to 7%
*For the composite organization presented in the full TEI study
The CTO at the investment management firm added: “If you think about the sales and marketing funnel of an organization, [by having] the ability to put insights into every stage of that journey, knowing who the person that’s viewing the insight [is and] what their impact is on the client, and knowing what the client is thinking and what they want, you can dramatically improve the interaction [you have with the client]. … By taking away some of the administrative work, the upside is that you get more time focused on the client.”
Interviewees said the improved client experience has a direct correlation with potential business growth.
“GenAI is here to stay, so if we don’t use it, we become less competitive. People are our biggest assets, so we want to empower them with assisted information like this. It helps them save a lot of time. It helps them be more knowledgeable. They can analyze better and come to a decision quicker. All this helps our organization be better.”
Chief architect, bank
For more information, download the full study: “The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Azure OpenAI Service In Reinventing Customer And Constituent Engagement,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, July 2024.
While the value story above is based on two interviews, Forrester interviewed 20 total representatives at 16 organizations with experience using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and combined the results into a three-year financial analysis for a composite organization. Projected quantified benefits include:
Readers should be aware of the following:
This study is commissioned by Microsoft and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
Microsoft reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.
Microsoft provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.
1 Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s
technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.
2 Source: Generative AI: What It Means For Banking, Forrester Research, Inc., February 26, 2024.
Forrester provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders deliver key outcomes. Fueled by our customer-obsessed research, Forrester’s seasoned consultants partner with leaders to execute their specific priorities using a unique engagement model that ensures lasting impact. For more information, visit forrester.com/consulting.
© Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.
Cookie Preferences
Accept Cookies
Decline
Close
This website uses cookies to deliver functionality and enhance your experience. GDPR requires that we obtain your consent before activating these cookies. Please accept the use of cookies or review your cookie settings now.
A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions (data inputs, website navigation), so you don’t have to re-enter data when you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.
Behavioral information collected by our web analytics vendor is used to analyze data pertaining to visitor trends, plan website enhancements, and measure overall website effectiveness. We may also use cookies or web beacons to help us offer you products, programs, or services that may be of interest to you and to deliver relevant advertising. We may use third-party advertising companies to help tailor website content to users or to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may also employ cookies and web beacons to measure advertising effectiveness.
Please accept cookies and the collection of behavioral information to receive full functionality and enhance your experience. If you decline cookies, some features of the website may not function normally.
Please see our
Privacy Policy for more information.