HDFC Bank Built AI Platform Neev With ₹2 Crore Initial Investment
HDFC Bank says it built its in-house AI platform, Neev, with an initial investment of ₹2 crore.
SociapaHQ
HDFC Bank has created its own AI platform, Neev, with an initial investment of just ₹2 crore, challenging the notion that large enterprises need big AI budgets to develop competitive AI capabilities.
“We spent a few more crores after we built the platform initially,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, Group Head – Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, HDFC Bank.
The idea for Neev came after a trip to the United States a few years ago when members of his technology team suggested building an AI platform in-house rather than buying an external solution, Lakshminarayanan said.
He said he was initially sceptical of the proposal but the team asked for three months to show a proof of concept. Today, Neev is being run and maintained by a dedicated team of about 40 people.
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In-House AI:
The executive also pushed back on the notion that it takes billion-dollar investments for companies to be competitive in A.I. He said the biggest costs are often from repeated use of large language models, or LLMs, and it is more practical for organisations to build smaller, domain-specific AI models better tailored to their business needs.
Sandhya Ramchandran Arun, Global CTO, Wipro, said that enterprises get more value from AI models that are specialised versus general-purpose large language models trained on broad datasets, sharing similar sentiments.
"But domain-specific models are more accurate, faster and better for business applications, so they are best suited for enterprise deployments," she said.
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“Banking applications require high accuracy and reliability and HDFC Bank has decided to build its own AI capabilities,” Lakshminarayanan said. He said that getting AI prototypes to be production-ready requires a lot of fine-tuning, testing and deep domain expertise.
He said another reason for keeping an internally controlled AI platform was the bank’s ability to monitor model behaviour and compliance before deployment, in the face of evolving regulatory expectations.
Rather than building isolated AI applications, HDFC Bank has designed Neev as a reusable AI platform capable of supporting multiple business use cases.
