Deciding where AI belongs in a financial centre's client service

ADGM, an international financial centre, needed to scale its client servicing and improve responsiveness. Client enquiries were growing rapidly with the centre's expansion to Al Reem Island, lead management was rudimentary with no scoring mechanism, Salesforce was largely underutilised, and limited data integration placed a heavy manual burden on the team's ability to scale.

Over an 11-week engagement via Arthur D. Little, Garry assessed the current state across the full customer lifecycle: 5 lifecycle phases, 12 journey stages and 28 journey steps, each examined across 10 dimensions, surfacing around 60 pain points. Five international financial centres were benchmarked alongside 32 use cases from beyond the sector.

Three ideation sprints and six workshops with seven ADGM departments turned that evidence into roughly 100 remedies, organised into 31 initiatives and shortlisted by impact and complexity to 8, with 4 prioritised for immediate delivery: governance of the customer-facing knowledge base with defined maker, checker and editor roles; a relationship management framework with value-driving KPIs; an internal GenAI assistant supporting employee experience; and a customer-facing AI chatbot. For each, the service model defined what AI should know, what it should be trusted to decide, and where a human must remain in the loop.

ADGM's Markets team began delivering the high-priority initiatives within the same year, sequenced against the organisation's wider AI and platform programmes. The digitalisation effort gained a clear, benchmarked roadmap with governance designed in from the start and explicit boundaries for where AI could operate and where it could not.