Sphere for Employees – The Agentic AI Copilot Transforming Efficiency & Experience in Financial Services

Frontline staff in banks and credit unions have to maintain a (seemingly) impossible balance. On the one hand, rising customer expectations challenge them to deliver evermore knowledgeable and personalized service across channels. On the other hand, institutions are also under pressure to cut costs, driving demands for greater efficiency from the very same employees. 

If this wasn’t enough, these employees must also achieve this balancing act while juggling several applications and tools. For financial institutions still relying on outdated systems, this challenge often feels impossible. But for those embracing AI, this goal is well within reach.

Enter Sphere for Employees – an industry-first, agentic AI copilot specifically built for financial services. Powered by proprietary Generative AI, Sphere empowers employees to work more efficiently and effectively by automating repetitive tasks, sourcing answers in real-time, and providing personalized suggestions. The impact is two-fold: 1) increased employee efficiency, and 2) transformed customer experience with more helpful and tailored support. 

In this blog, we’ll explore what Sphere for Employees is, how it works, and most importantly, how it’s driving real results for banks and credit unions.

What is Sphere for Employees?

To begin explaining what Sphere for Employees is, it’s helpful to understand what agentic AI really is. 

Agentic AI is the latest development in AI, and it’s set to transform how banks interact with their customers. While traditional AI focuses primarily on automating routine tasks – helping institutions streamline processes and reduce manual effort – agentic AI takes a more autonomous and proactive approach. It doesn’t just automate; it actively assists. 

By analyzing data in real-time, rather than waiting for input, it can provide real-time insights, personalized recommendations, and intelligent decision-making support. This helps employees make informed decisions quickly.

Sphere for Employees is built on these principles. As an agentic AI copilot, Sphere acts autonomously to support frontline staff so they can work with greater efficiency, accuracy, and personalization. By integrating with core banking systems, Sphere can also combine the functionality of multiple applications into one platform so employees aren’t hindered by the inefficiency of switching between systems.

Sphere can be used by all frontline staff – contact center agents, bankers, tellers, and branch employees. This creates a single source of knowledge that all employees can pull from, ensuring consistent and accurate support across the organization.

Sphere ‘speaks’ to employees using multiple modes- voice, video, and visuals – making it a fully multimodal solution tailored to their specific tasks.

Sphere for Employees – How it works

• Automate answer retrieval

Frontline staff often spend significant time searching for answers to the plethora of questions asked by customers and members. Sphere for Employees instantly eliminates this by analyzing customer queries in real time and delivering the right answer to the agent. To increase response speed even further, Sphere doesn’t simply provide the agent with the document that contains the necessary information. It retrieves the specific information from within the document and highlights it to the agent.

Unlike many generic AI solutions that rely on broad datasets, these answers are grounded in the company’s own trusted content – policies, procedures, product details, and customer data. This ensures that every response is accurate and compliant. Owing to its combination of advanced NLPs, MLs, and Generative AI, this information can be processed unstructured so you don’t need to spend weeks formatting existing content.

interface.ai’s proprietary Generative AI also enhances the responses by dynamically generating real-time, context-aware responses tailored to the specific customer and conversation.

Read on: Outpace your Competitors: Deploy AI Self-Service in Minutes with interface.ai

• Seamless transactional power

Sphere doesn’t just help agents answer questions – it’s built to help them execute tasks and perform actions on behalf of the customers. Thanks to its robust library of integrations, Sphere allows employees to perform important actions – such as transferring funds or updating account information – directly from the platform without needing to switch between different applications. As Estela Nagahashi, EVP, Chief Operating Officer, University Credit Union, explained:

“At UCU, interface.ai’s Sphere… replaces 14-15 applications, enhancing our frontline operations’ efficiency by 10x.”

Through interface.ai’s deep integrations with all the core banking systems, a wide range of processes and workflows are instantly streamlined. As well as improving operational efficiency, this capability also accelerates transaction processing, making interactions smoother for customers.

• Real-time personalization

A crucial aspect of Sphere for Employees is its ability to personalize every interaction. By operating in real-time, Sphere analyzes the conversation and customer context to offer tailored guidance, insights, and upsell opportunities based on their specific needs and preferences.

Sphere’s intelligent recommendation engine acts as an in-context maestro, providing agents with relevant suggestions, such as cross-sell and upsell opportunities and personalized product or service recommendations. This doesn’t just enhance the customer experience – it helps financial institutions drive more value from each interaction by surfacing offerings that are most relevant to the individual customer.

For example, during a conversation about mortgage refinancing, Sphere might suggest a customized loan option that aligns with the customer’s financial goals, or offer guidance on related services like insurance or investment products. By analyzing customer history and live interaction data, Sphere ensures that recommendations are timely and relevant.

This real-time personalization transforms Sphere from a simple support tool into a proactive copilot, orchestrating the entire customer journey to maximize customer satisfaction, loyalty, and financial outcomes.

How is it different from Microsoft’s AI copilot?

Microsoft Copilot’s generalist approach, while useful in many areas, does not provide the level of domain-specific expertise out of the box that interface.ai offers.

Microsoft was one of the first AI companies to introduce the concept ‘copilot’. While Sphere is also a copilot and has some fundamental similarities with Microsoft’s copilot, Sphere stands apart in several critical ways that make it a better fit for employees in financial services.

First and foremost, while Microsoft Copilot is a powerful, general-purpose AI for enterprise-wide applications, it lacks the depth needed for financial-specific tasks. Sphere for Employees, by contrast, is specifically designed for financial institutions, with deep expertise in banking workflows, regulatory requirements, and customer support. As a result, while institutions are forced to spend extensive resources building their solutions from scratch with Microsoft, interface.ai’s copilot is ready to go with out-of-the-box solutions.

On top of this is the data that both the solutions are powered on. Microsoft’s copilot relies on general AI models and broad feedback mechanisms which can lead to generic responses. In stark contrast, interface.ai’s copilot is grounded in domain-specific data, powered by over 1.5 million banking conversations every day. Combining this with human-in-the-loop for continual improvement, interface.ai offers far higher rates of accuracy and automation than any generic LLM could provide.

Wrap-up 

Balancing rising customer expectations with the demand for operational efficiency doesn’t have to be a struggle for financial institutions. With Sphere for Employees, banks and credit unions can empower their frontline staff to deliver faster, more accurate, and highly personalized support—without being bogged down by repetitive tasks or inefficient systems.

Sphere’s agentic AI capabilities unlock new levels of productivity and service excellence, seamlessly integrating with core banking platforms to streamline workflows.
Ready to learn more? Let’s talk about how Sphere can help your institution thrive in this AI-driven future.