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2 hours ago
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At American Express, relationships are at the heart of how we deliver world class service excellence. Our Customer Care Professionals and Travel Counselors do more than just service requests and or book trips; they offer guidance, earn trust, and help create memorable experiences. Now with Generative AI (Gen AI) we’re amplifying human connections and empowering our workforce in many ways.
Gen AI Empowering our People
In our role as engineers, we often talk about scale, speed, and performance. But the real magic happens when those things translate into something more human-like helping a colleague deliver faster, more thoughtful service. It lets our colleagues shine, while our customers feel truly seen and cared for. That value we deliver to our colleagues and customers through impactful use cases drives our work on Gen AI at American Express.
Use Case #1: Travel Counselor Assist – Real-Time AI Support on the Front Lines
One of the areas where we first introduced Gen AI was in servicing, integrating real-time intelligence directly within the workflow. This advancement empowers our Travel Counselors to access relevant suggestions and context-aware insights instantly as they engage with customers. The tool leverages large language models and real time data to deliver high quality recommendations in the moment, reducing manual search, while enhancing support and personalization and delighting Card Members.
We are seeing clear benefits with 88% of Travel Counselors globally reporting high satisfaction with the tool. Travel Counselors also shared that the tool simplifies their workflow and gives them the confidence and expertise to serve Card Members better than ever.
Use Case #2: Colleague Help Center Knowledge Assist – A Smarter Way to Support Our People
The second use case we’re excited about is the Knowledge Assist tool, a Gen AI-powered chatbot delivering real-time relevant information to help our colleagues resolve customer inquiries faster and more accurately. Instead of manually searching through static articles, our frontline colleagues can now ask questions and receive direct, AI-generated answers pulled from approved content. This allows them to stay fully focused on what matters most - the customer.
With Colleague Help Center Knowledge Assist, we’re enhancing both colleague and customer satisfaction due to faster, more accurate resolutions which lead to fewer call-backs. In fact, through our work reformatting thousands of documents for accuracy we’re seeing a 98% accuracy rate for AI-generated answers in the US (as of May ‘25).
Engineering Excellence: Building Responsibly at Scale
Behind the scenes, our engineers have built robust, enterprise-ready pipelines that balance innovation with safety. We strive to ensure our Gen AI tools are low-latency, highly reliable and meet rigorous compliance and performance standards.
Key principles in our approach:
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Architecture: Built to scale and meet compliance requirements.
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Observability: Deep monitoring, feedback loops, and appropriate human oversight drive continuous improvement.
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Responsible AI: Every model is evaluated through a governed framework to ensure fairness and traceability.
Our commitment? Never compromise on trust, service, or security, because our teams depend on us to get it right every time.
This thoughtful approach ensures we maintain our brand promise of trust, security and service because when our Customer Care Professionals and Travel Counselors depend on these tools in real time, there’s no room for error.
Why We Do This
The true reward isn’t just metrics or technical wins. It’s in the moments we sit with a colleague, whether a Travel Counselor or Customer Care Professional, and watch them use these tools, see them work with ease, and effortlessly navigate the customer’s needs without friction. It’s technically challenging, but immensely rewarding when a colleague says, “This saved me five clicks and got me back to my customer faster.” That’s when we know we’ve built something that truly matters.
Final Thought: Relationship-Powered. Tech-Enabled.
We’re building platforms that let our colleagues focus on what matters most – the customer.
Our approach is relationship-powered and tech-enabled. We’re not here to automate empathy; we’re here to clear the path for it. Gen AI helps remove repetitive tasks, the delays, and the noise so our colleagues can be responsive and human for every customer, every time.
At American Express, we’re proud to be relationship-powered and tech-enabled. It’s not just the future—it’s the present we’re creating every day.
