The bank tested us on half a million of its customers before it tested us on its bankers.
Since 2023, Promethist has been Česká spořitelna's AI partner. It started on the customer side, with a fraud-awareness agent inside the bank's George app that reached over half a million people and held their attention long enough to change what they knew about fraud.
Read the fraud-awareness story
With that proven, the bank pointed the same capability at its own people: the thousands of bankers who sit across the desk from those customers every day.
The meeting that carries the margin is the one bankers avoid.
Investment products are one of the bank's largest growth opportunities, and the conversation that opens them is the one bankers avoid. Every meeting that stays on current accounts and mortgages is margin the bank never books, across hundreds of branches, every working day.
Simulation-based training was a step forward from static eLearning. But a simulation forgets you the moment you close it. It cannot connect practice to the meeting you have at two o'clock, and it cannot carry you past week three.
Scale without proportional cost
A workforce spread across hundreds of Czech branches. In-person coaching and specialist visits cannot reach everyone, and static eLearning does not build skill.
The knowledge lives in people
The most valuable advisory knowledge lives in experienced bankers' heads, not in documents. What gets written down tends to be surface-level, rarely reflecting how it works in practice.
Instinctive behaviours
The real gap is not knowledge but behaviour under pressure. Bankers know what to say in theory; the challenge is doing it naturally with a client in front of them.
One agent decides what to work on. The other is where the work happens.
Empower is not a training tool with an AI layer on top. Two agents work in alternation: the Empower Agent, which carries a banker's development across months, and the role-play simulations, which stand in for the clients that banker meets. One decides what to work on. The other is where the work happens.
How a session works
- 1The banker opens the app and sets the agenda: an upcoming client meeting, a topic to revisit, a situation to debrief
- 2The Empower agent guides the conversation, connecting development to the banker's own client list and history
- 3Where appropriate, the coach transitions to a specialised role-play agent matching the actual client profile
- 4The Empower Agent closes the session with a written evaluation: what worked, what to change, what to bring to the next meeting
- 5Everything is remembered: progress compounds session over session, month over month
- 6Topic analysis surfaces the patterns no survey or performance review reaches
Progress, strengths and the next thing to work on, after every session.
I open the coach before almost every meeting, ten, fifteen minutes. I give it what I already know about the client, and it hands me the angle, the phrases, the way in. That speed is exactly what I need.
Four things a simulation cannot do, because it forgets you.
Persistent Relational Agent
Maintains continuity across sessions, tracking progress, connecting practice to the meetings a banker has next, and adapting guidance to each banker's development over time.
Role-play simulations that push back
Stand-ins for the client types a banker meets, from the conservative older investor to the first-timer who has never held a fund.
It knows where each banker is weak
It builds a model of one banker, not a cohort, so the next session goes at the gap rather than the syllabus.
Real-time scenario spawning
The Empower Agent builds a role-play simulation on the spot, matched to the meeting the banker has that afternoon.
The bank ran us against the market standard, in its own branches.
The first phases were built to answer one question: does the coaching layer deliver more than the role-play tools the market already sells? Running both formats as a deliberate internal comparison gave cleaner insight than an external benchmark could.
Phase 1A: Coaching
The full Empower solution: a persistent Relational Agent combined with role-play scenarios. Validated that the coaching layer delivers meaningfully more than role-play alone.
Phase 1B: Academy, the benchmark
Role-play only, without the coaching layer. This served as the market-standard benchmark, a deliberate internal comparison against what others offer.
Phase 2: Crossover
The Academy group moved onto the full Empower Agent. Having now used both, they had the one comparison no external benchmark can buy, and they stayed on the coaching version.
Bankers asked about older clients, not younger ones. The programme had been aimed the other way.
One of the most valuable outputs was what emerged from analysing the topics bankers raised with their Empower agent. Questions about communicating with older, conservative clients significantly outnumbered questions about younger ones, directly contradicting the project's initial focus.
Bankers speak more openly in a private, low-stakes interaction with an Empower agent than they would in a survey or performance review. That candour gave the bank's learning and development team a window into the real concerns of their workforce that they had never had before.
Voluntary weekend usage
Sessions landed on weekends and in the evenings from the first weeks, with nobody asked to log in. In a professional context that is a stronger signal than a satisfaction score: it means people reached for it rather than completing it.
More realistic than anything before
Bankers who had used role-play tools before reported the simulated clients felt markedly more realistic. The experienced ones asked for harder profiles, which Phase 2 added.
She had a client who insisted there was money left over at the end of every month, and somehow nothing to show for it. She wasn't sure how to handle it, and admits she wouldn't have been bold enough to push. The coach told her to ask him outright: where does it actually go? So she did. He stayed completely relaxed, and she followed with the question the coach had teed up: could he picture setting some of it aside for the future, not just for right now?
Now I ask that question on my own. I don't need the coach in my ear to do it anymore.
First branches grew investment margin 8.77%, against 7.84% nationally.
The first phases had one job: show whether the coaching layer changed anything a branch manager could see in their own numbers. It did. Empower is now live with thousands of bankers across the branch network, with role-play simulations that keep evolving from real banker conversations.
The first branches outpaced the national average on investment product margin growth, the primary revenue lever in advisory work. One wave and early days, but it moved in the right direction on the metric the bank already tracks.
What bankers took back into real client conversations.
- 67%
- Rate it useful for their own development, not just the bank's targets
- 60%
- Named concrete benefits they could apply in practice
The bankers and branch managers who used it.
I don't normally live with AI. But this is spoken (I don't have to write a single thing) and that makes it so much easier. The old written training I did out of obligation. This I actually reach for.
Read all 10 in one list
“I don't normally live with AI. But this is spoken (I don't have to write a single thing) and that makes it so much easier. The old written training I did out of obligation. This I actually reach for.”
“We have one coach for the whole of south-west Bohemia, so he hasn't much time for us, physically we just can't get to him. The agent lends us that coaching capacity. It has to be seen that way, because otherwise the information simply never reaches us.”
“The biggest benefit is the coach. I tell it: I have a client, he's conservative, he has no experience with investing, I want to show him how to make his money work, and I give it the specifics. Then it tells me specifically what to do.”
“The bankers didn't resent it the way they resented the old tool, because they actually got to a result. The old one was all about hitting a required percentage and saying the right phrases.”
“Easy clients are fine, but we need the demanding ones too. That's maybe the real success, we have to prepare for the ones who still don't get it after you've explained it.”
“Given how fast everything is moving, it's probably one of the best options we've had available.”
“It is a genuinely useful tool for new joiners who can't get onto real meetings yet, help with taking those first knocks.”
“It genuinely helps me, not just inwardly, but in being more willing to break new ground with clients.”
“It answers everything. Whatever I ask, it advises me on. I like that I talk to it, if I had to go and find clients to practise on myself, that would never happen.”
“This is genuinely the era where AI is going to help us and become an indispensable teammate. The sooner they learn to work with it, the fewer worries they'll have.”
A regulated bank, a distributed network, and the metric it already tracked.
A regulated European bank ran us beside the sales-enablement tool it already owned, in its own branches, judged on the metric it already tracks.
In production inside a regulated bank
Not a sandbox or an innovation-lab rollout. Live in Česká spořitelna, part of Erste Group, 5M+ clients across 7 countries, for three years and counting.
Voice-first, on the phone they already carry
No new hardware, no desk-only client, no scheduled workshop. Spoken Czech, opened in the ten minutes before a client meeting.
Bankers preferred it to the tool they had
The bank ran an established sales-enablement tool alongside it. Branch managers reported their bankers stopped resenting the training, because with this one they reached a result rather than a required percentage.
Measured on the bank's numbers
Judged on branch margin growth against the national average, a metric the bank already tracks, not on course completions.
Coaching that fits the way a branch day actually runs.
- 76%
- Value having the coach on their work phone
- 71%
- Call it a useful extension of the support they already get
Your bankers are already in the meeting. Nothing is coaching them into it.
Coaching capacity that lives in a handful of people cannot reach a network of thousands, and the conversations carrying your margin are the ones your people avoid. This began with one segment and one metric the bank already tracked.