TD has thousands of policies and procedures that govern nearly every type of process and transaction.
Branch banking colleagues at TD know this firsthand. As clients ask questions, they often have to search for answers – first on the TD intranet. If they can't find what they need, they may ask a fellow colleague in-branch or phone a secondary colleague helpline. But this takes time, which means clients are left waiting.
Enter the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant. This generative AI-powered chatbot can help colleagues surface information to answer client questions accurately in mere seconds, whereas questions could take up to 10 minutes to resolve in the past, depending on the complexity of the ask.
After launching as a pilot project late last year, this tool is now available to more than 19,000 colleagues across Branch Banking, with a 94% adoption rate and an active rate (those who used the tool within the past two weeks) between 70 and 75%.
"There was a lot of friction in the old process," said Catherine Paradis-Therrien, AVP, Analytics, Insights, and AI, who helped lead the development of the tool.
"Whenever colleagues didn't have an answer, they had to pick up the phone and call to get more information. It could take anywhere between four and 10 minutes per call. And, when you have a client that needs help in front of you, it could be pretty stressful. With the virtual assistant, colleagues can now just ask their questions in natural language, and get an accurate answer in seconds"
Since the launch of TD Virtual Assistant, outgoing calls to support teams for advice and information have been reduced by 89%.
How do TD colleagues use the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant?
Ben Piemontese, a Branch Manager in Pickering, Ont., has seen the transformative power of the tool.
"I can't remember everything," he said. "There are so many different policies that change from one year to the next."
Take RESPs, for instance. The federal government recently updated the withdrawal rules, which in turn resulted in updates to the Bank’s RESP policy. By using the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant to help answer a client's question about RESPs, colleagues can feel more confident they're providing clients with timely information.
"The Virtual Assistant surfaces up-to-date information, which can be especially helpful for topics we may not deal with regularly. There are things we maybe do quarterly or maybe twice a year," he said. For those more obscure tasks, the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant is especially helpful.
Piemontese shared that it's also become a crucial training tool for new colleagues who can use it to not only surface information more quickly when interacting with clients, but to learn about the Bank's myriad policies and procedures.
All colleagues, and especially those with a long tenure, play a key role in helping the tool remain accurate. When the chatbot shares an answer, colleagues can click a thumbs up or thumbs down button to rate the response.
"We do very robust monitoring of the accuracy of the results," said Paradis-Therrien. "And there's a lot of attention by branch leadership to understand, Who is using it? Who is not using it? How do we improve this adoption?"
Since the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant works like the generative AI chatbots colleagues might have on their phones, Paradis-Therrien encourages colleagues to start playing around with consumer apps in their personal lives to help make the prompting process feel more natural.
How did TD develop its Branch Banking Virtual Assistant?
The TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant is among several generative AI chatbots available to colleagues across the Bank. One of the first was developed for North American Customer Operations (NACO), a department that fields nearly 60 million client phone calls per year.
That tool took about eight months to create. For the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant, the teams building it didn't have to start from scratch. Paradis-Therrien and her team of data scientists and AI specialists, including colleagues from Layer 6 (the TD AI research and development centre), were able to build on the framework of the NACO model.
That meant the team was able to cut down on months of work and have a pilot of the Branch Banking Virtual Assistant in-market in only two months from the time development started.
Paradis-Therrien said this is an example of the Bank’s “build once, use many” AI mentality in action. The Bank’s AI teams are redeploying proven use cases that assist colleagues and clients and generate business value in multiple areas of the Bank to help maximize impact.
Aside from the contact centres and branches, similar virtual assistants were also deployed in TD Wealth and TD Securities in 2025.
Since launching, Paradis-Therrien and her team are constantly evaluating and reevaluating the tool. The feedback from branch colleagues has been invaluable. For Piemontese and his team, the TD Branch Banking Virtual Assistant is really all about empowerment. It's helping them provide clients with a better in-branch experience – without having to manually navigate through about 8,000 or so policies.
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