Tan Su Shan, chief executive officer of DBS Group Holdings Ltd., speaking at the Singapore Fintech Festival in Singapore, on Nov. 12, 2025.
SINGAPORE - Amid fears of an artificial intelligence bubble, much has been made of recent reports suggesting that AI has yet to generate returns for companies investing billions into adopting the tech.
But that's not what the chief executive of Southeast Asia's largest bank is seeing — she says her firm is already reaping the rewards of its AI initiatives, and it's only just the beginning.
"It's not hope. It's now. It's already happening. And it will get even better," DBS CEO Tan Su Shan told CNBC on the sidelines of Singapore Fintech Week, when asked about the promise of AI adoption.
DBS has been working to implement artificial intelligence across its bank for over a decade, which helped prepare its internal data analytics for recent waves of generative and agentic AI.
Agentic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that relies on data to proactively make independent decisions, plan and execute tasks autonomously, with minimal human oversight.
Tan expects AI adoption to bring DBS an overall revenue bump of more than 1 billion Singapore dollars (about $768 million) this year, compared to SG$750 million in 2024. That assessment is based on about 370 AI use cases powered by over 1,500 models throughout its business.
"The proliferation of generative AI has been transformative for us," Tan said, adding that the company was experiencing a "snowballing effect" of benefits thanks to machine learning.
A major area in which DBS has applied AI is in its financial services to institutional clients, with AI used to collect and leverage data for clients in order to better contextualize and personalize offerings.
According to Tan, this has resulted in "faster and more resilient" teams. The CEO believes that these uses of AI have contributed to a recent uptick in the bank's deposit growth as compared to competitors'.
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