Commerzbank AG, one of Germany’s leading financial institutions, needed to modernize digital customer support while addressing fragmented legacy systems, evolving regulatory compliance requirements, fraud prevention demands, and rising customer expectations for instant, personalized service. The bank set out to bridge the gap between what customers demanded and what outdated systems could deliver — and it needed a solution that maintained trust, transparency, and security at full retail-banking scale.
Commerzbank built Ava, an AI-powered conversational agent on Microsoft Foundry Agent Service and Microsoft Agent Framework, deployed on Azure infrastructure. Ava leverages Azure OpenAI for natural language understanding, Azure AI Content Safety for fraud detection and data protection, Azure Cosmos DB for persistent conversation memory, Azure Kubernetes Service for scalability, Azure AI Search for trusted data retrieval, and text-to-speech for voice interactions. Gerald Ertl, Managing Director and Head of Strategic AI Program, said: “Foundry Agent Service gives us the building blocks for the future and has changed how we think about service.”
Ava now manages more than 30,000 customer conversations monthly, autonomously resolving roughly 75% of requests while providing round-the-clock support. The agent handles complex workflows including credit card lifecycle management, balance inquiries, and account adjustments, and development velocity doubled through GitHub Copilot integration and streamlined DevOps. Looking ahead, Commerzbank plans to expand Ava into a specialized multi-agent network spanning lending, business banking, and operations using next-generation Foundry Agent Service capabilities.