Münster/Mülheim-Kärlich - LBS NordWest has reached another milestone in its AI journey by implementing CASA, a company-wide AI Assistant, in partnership with ThinkOwl. CASA becomes a digital team member for more than 1,000 employees, as it provides them a central platform to use AI securely in their daily work. Built on ThinkOwl's OwlSpot AI platform, CASA lays the foundation for scalable and compliant use of artificial intelligence across the organization.
CASA helps employees understand information more quickly, formulate content, streamline tasks, and analyze complex issues. The goal is to simplify routine activities and support employees in handling complex tasks in their day-to-day work. Typical use cases range from summarizing emails and capturing meeting notes to creating presentations and analyzing and processing specialized information.
With CASA, LBS NordWest is also laying the groundwork for the secure and compliant use of various large language models (LLMs). As the platform is hosted in the European Union (EU), it will allow controlled access to different AI models and ensure that corporate data is not used to train any underlying models.
CASA's key feature is acting as a company-wide "AI socket." Through an integrated AI gateway, the platform combines various AI models, applications, business assistants, and agents to make them available to employees as needed. CASA thus serves as the technological foundation for LBS NordWest's larger AI strategy.
The implementation was carried out in close collaboration between LBS NordWest and ThinkOwl over the course of just a few months. High demand for the platform within the organization became evident during the implementation phase.
"At the heart of CASA lie powerful language models that our employees can now use for prompting. The fact that the name was chosen by our staff beautifully illustrates that digitalization succeeds best when people are involved and new solutions are created collaboratively," says Dr. Jörg Koschate, member of the board of LBS Landesbausparkasse NordWest.
"We view AI not as an isolated tool, but as a foundational technology for our company's future. CASA is designed to become a valuable digital team member for our staff — supporting daily work, making knowledge accessible, and enabling greater productivity. Together with ThinkOwl, we have successfully established this foundation in a very short time while simultaneously laying the groundwork for many additional use cases," adds Thorben Geers, Project Lead at LBS NordWest.
"Many companies today face the challenge of making artificial intelligence secure and controlled while ensuring it is accessible to as many employees as possible. With CASA and our OwlSpot AI platform, LBS NordWest is establishing this foundation precisely. Together, we are creating a secure, scalable infrastructure that allows centralized deployment of various AI models, specialized business assistants, and future agents. This transforms AI from a standalone tool into a strategic corporate resource," says Rolf Esau, Managing Director of ThinkOwl.
Additional specialized AI Agents for various business units are already planned for future expansion stages. The focus lies on user acceptance, active employee engagement, and the sequential unlocking of new use cases across the entire value chain.
As a member of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, LBS NordWest continues to rely on strategic cooperation with Finanz Informatik, as well as on developments and pilot projects within the Sparkasse organization. CASA complements these initiatives by providing the entire workforce with quick access to modern AI technologies that are flexible, practical, and rapidly scalable.
LBS serves more than a third of the German population across the four federal states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Berlin, and Bremen. They enjoy the trust of 2 million customers holding 2.4 million contracts with a total contract volume of just under €98 billion.