DBS’ years-long investment in AI and machine learning drove record deposit inflows, wealth growth and fee income in 2025, Chief Executive Tan Su Shan said.

Speaking at the bank’s results briefing on February 9, Tan said AI-powered tools such as contextual nudges and automated customer engagement were key to attracting new-to-bank customers and driving volume growth.

The Business Times reported that DBS has increasingly embedded AI across its operations to improve customer acquisition and productivity.

“This I can attribute to the hard work we’ve done over the years in using AI, using machine learning and contextual nudges to gather new-to-bank customers, to be customer-centric, to have our nudges automated and to use AI smartly,”

Tan said.

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into daily workflows, Tan said it will be harder to isolate its precise economic value.

However, its main benefit lies in freeing up staff for growth-focused work.

“We might still try to capture the economic value… based on what we’ve been doing in the past, which is A/B testing, but I suspect there will be a lot more in terms of capacity building,”

she said.

Tan noted that AI has compressed work that once took months or years into weeks, particularly in addressing technical debt. The time saved can then be redeployed towards business expansion.

More than 60% of DBS staff are now actively using the bank’s in-house generative AI tool, DBS GPT.

While the tool was “not so good” when it first rolled out last July, DBS has since improved it and now uses it for tasks ranging from translation to policy queries.

DBS said in January that the economic value generated from its AI initiatives rose to S$1 billion in 2025, up from S$750 million in 2024, based on comparisons between AI-enabled customers and control groups.

Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by tapati2528 via Freepik