AI turbo charges BMO’s drive to data automation

At BMO, digital isn’t just a channel – it’s the way we operate every part of the business, driving efficiencies and freeing up more human capacity to do what we do best: give expert advice and boldly grow the good. As part of BMO’s commitment to offer a more personalized, digital experience for our customers, we are leveraging data and analytics to empower our people to drive customer growth and deepen relationships.  

Recently, BMO’s Enterprise Data & Analytics team identified a need for innovative solutions to efficiently organize and navigate large databases to adjust for the increase in data creation, storage, and usage. Thus, the team used AI and tagging recommendations to create TagAI (aka BMO tags).  

Paramount to productivity, TagAI leverages machine-learning to suggest relevant metadata classification tags (beyond basic tags already in place) to databases, using real-data examples and previously manually entered metadata elements. A key feature, the active learning mechanism, allows users to input feedback on accuracy, which TagAI captures to improve performance and gain predictive patterns from data. 

The Automation Advantage 

TagAI accelerates both pace and scale in searches while maintaining tag consistency throughout the data. Additionally, it recognizes alternate ways to reference data and associated acronyms, which streamlines discovery of new, useful data. Importantly, it allows data practitioners to browse elements related to selected tags and support mature data governance and management practices. 

What’s to come  

BMO has started deploying this technology to support additional classification of data within its largest data warehouses – this will be expanded over time to other data assets within the Bank.