New Way Now: Discover powers award-winning customer experiences with gen AI and Google Cloud

*Summary:* Szabolcs Paldy, senior vice president of enterprise operations at Discover Financial Services, discusses how Google Cloud is helping the digital banking and payment services company improve its award-winning customer experience with AI. The company’s latest innovation, the Discover Virtual Assistant, powered by generative AI, can assist customers directly and provide additional information to Discover service agents, delivering smoother, more efficient, and more satisfying interactions to customers around the world — in whatever channel they prefer. *Challenge:* With its mission to provide top-tier support to customers in the channel of their choice, Discover was looking for a way to use gen AI to help customers get the answers they’re looking for while also empowering its nearly 10,000 contact center agents to understand customer intent and resolve queries as quickly as possible. In particular, Discover wanted to address one of the biggest pain points in traditional contact center experiences — putting customers on hold while live agents look for the right information. *Solution:* With Vertex AI, Discover built the Discover Virtual Assistant, which customers can access through both the Discover mobile app or website to ask vital support questions and get answers in natural language quickly. Even more importantly, for customers that want to speak to a live agent, the Virtual Assistant can summarize the full context of a conversation and transfer both the customer and that information directly to the support team, enabling live agents to pick up the conversations right where they left off. In addition, the Virtual Assistant provides the most relevant documents across the company’s policies and procedures, reducing the time customers spend waiting for answers. *Result:* With the support of the Discover Virtual Assistant, Discover agents now spend less time searching and more time helping customers. Live agents are now up to 70% faster at accessing the r