Following the launch of Vistra’s Global Expansion Platform (GEP) and our AI-powered compliance agent Geni, the buzz of excitement continues to hum throughout our organisation and reverberate with clients. The integration of this platform technology with generative AI is already proving transformative for the industry and, as Geni undergoes continuous training and gains real-world experience, the combination becomes even more powerful.

However, exciting as this is, ultimately GEP with Geni is just a tool. The core of Vistra’s competitive advantage continues to reside with our 9,000 people across the world and their outstanding expertise. It is they who provide the service to our clients and, for all the technology buzz, it is they who deserve the credit. Our new AI-powered platform is only there to support our clients with greater choice, speed and accuracy. 

We have approached the AI question at Vistra by organising our thinking into the two sides of the service equation: how what we do is produced, and how it is consumed. 

On the production side, agentic AI can be used to perform procedural tasks and fulfil the non-value adding aspects of services workflows. An obvious use case in our Global Entity Solutions Practice would be in support of the company secretary role with Geni transcribing and summarising board meeting minutes. The Company Secretary can focus on the critical higher-value task of ensuring that the minutes are a complete and true representation of the meeting. 

On the consumption side, a conversational AI agent provides a helpful wrapper around our services and so Geni works as an interface that interacts with the client like a personal assistant. She helps clients ensure they have the right documents in hand, streamline their compliance actions and keep tabs on compliance deadlines. In agentic mode, she can proactively scan client data on the platform, for example director passport expiry dates. Through active monitoring of regulatory compliance requirements, she ensures that potential issues are prevented before they arise.

At Vistra, we say ‘Our Purpose is Progress’, meaning that we exist to help our clients achieve their own goals and deliver progress to the world. Enabling our experts to be more effective in their roles and giving clients more choice and control on how they interact with Vistra go right to the heart of fulfilling that purpose.

We understand that much of what Vistra does, while critical, is not at the core of our clients’ businesses. They can’t create competitive advantage by being compliant, but falling out of compliance can be very disruptive and costly for them. By bringing more flexibility and power into the way they can access our services, we can reduce the time and resources they must use to get compliant and stay there. 

Of course, they can also pick up the phone and speak to a Vistra expert directly – just like they always have been able to do. 

Our experts are continuing to train Geni, who learns more each time she carries out a task. Vistra as an organisation will continue to evolve in kind, identifying the areas of our service where only human contact will do, and making those more accessible while automating more necessary but non-core tasks.

Geni is set to be an extremely capable and specialist compliance advisory agent that can act as a real-time, always-on advisor for all of Vistra’s global solutions – supporting an even more capable network of service professionals whose expertise our clients can access in an ever-evolving variety of ways.

We don’t view AI as a replacement for our human experts. Rather, we see this tool as a powerful way to augment what our people can bring to the table and what our clients can accomplish.