When NCR Digital Banking delivers a new version of its virtual assistant in a few weeks, small banks will have access to information that typically would require a data scientist to extrapolate.

Digital banking platform NCR has partnered with the New York-based Kasisto, which offers KAI Consumer Banking, an AI-based digital assistant for the financial sector, to deliver the new AI. Kasisto has $51 million in funding over five rounds, according to a company spokesperson, and works with large institutions including JPMorgan Chase, TD Bank and Standard Chartered.

With the partnership, Kasisto will incorporate a beta capability that allows banks to see information about the conversational data collected by the digital assistant. The tool, Kai Auto Intent Discovery, will be a free add-on for NCR’s clients, with deployments starting within a few weeks, according to Kasisto Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Epstein.

The new tool is the first such offering in the banking sector, Epstein said.

“We talk about this whole idea of democratizing conversational AI. This is a big part of it,” Epstein said. “We’re allowing small banks to have the same access to technology and data that the large banks have, and without having large data science teams. Auto Intent Discovery is a big part of that strategy.”

The challenge with conversational data is making sense of it. Conversational data is unstructured, meaning it isn’t organized in rows and cells; Auto Intent Discovery is able to categorize the unstructured data into topics, in the process uncovering topics new to the AI.

This function helps Kasisto develop the chatbot’s natural language capabilities. Unlike most mainstream AI platforms, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, Kasisto’s KAI is programmed specifically for the financial industry, Kasisto CEO Zor Gorelov told Bank Innovation. That’s good for bank customers, who may use finance-specific terms when seeking help, but it has proven to be an issue when chatbots were asked questions about pandemic hours, for instance.

However, Kasisto’s Auto Intent Discovery identified the terms “pandemic,” “COVID” and “ATM cleaning” as trending across its client base, allowing the company to alert NCR so its customers could incorporate an answer into the digital assistant.

Adding Auto Intent Discovery to KAI gives bank customers access to organized information, allowing them to see trends in the conversational data. The tool has been used in-house at Kasisto to improve its digital assistant for the past 18 months, Epstein said.

The new version of KAI also incorporates multitenancy, so more than one customer can run on the same instance of the cloud-based solution. In addition to potentially lower costs for customers, this pools conversational data to help identify larger trends.

Kasisto launched in 2013 in Silicon Valley as a spin-off from the Stanford Research Organization, which also created the technology on which Apple’s Siri is based. While Apple created Siri with the tech, Kasisto created the finance-focused KAI, Gorelov said.

NCR [NYSE: NCR] was trading at $34.06 at 11:31 a.m. and has a market capitalization of $4.53 billion.