The GenAI Journey at BNP Paribas Fortis: Addressing the hype and delivering high value use cases

Manuel Piette shares BNP Paribas Fortis’ pragmatic and structured approach to adopting GenAI. He walks through the bank’s initial experiments, infrastructure decisions, internal LLM deployment using Domino, and a set of real production use cases. Emphasizing the balance between innovation and risk management, he details how the bank scaled GenAI across teams, created accessible tooling like internal ChatGPT alternatives, and embedded evaluation and governance into every stage of development.

Key Takeaways:

1. Industrializing GenAI Requires Governance + Agility
   Domino enabled a secure, fast-moving environment to develop and deploy GenAI use cases rapidly while maintaining compliance.
2. Cross-Functional Collaboration is Essential
   Success came from a triangle model: Business + IT + Data Science, working together with a shared delivery rhythm and priorities.
3. Real-World Use Cases Deliver Tangible Value
   Use cases included a GenAI assistant for employees, document summarization, and LLM evaluation pipelines—all tied to business KPIs.