- Bajaj Finance increased AI agents from 62 to 130 as of Sept 30, 2026
- AI-driven loans rose 112% to Rs 2,744 crore in Q2FY27 versus last year
- Operating expenses ratio improved marginally by 10 basis points to 33%
Bajaj Finance has doubled down on its AI bet, with an investor presentation on Monday revealing that the NBFC ran 130 AI agents as of Sept. 30, 2026, compared with 62 at the end of the June quarter.
The company also pointed out that loans generated, as a result of the use of AI voice and text bots, amounted to Rs 2,744 crore in Q2FY27, up 112% as against Rs 1,295 crore in the second quarter last year.
Despite the surge in AI use and a sharp jump in generation of business leads, the key efficiency gauge has barely moved. The results declared by the company reveal that operating expenses as a share of net total income were 33% as of Sept. 30, about 10 basis points lower than 33.1% a year ago.
During the same quarterly period, the overall operating expenses rose 23% to Rs 5,275 crore.
The reduction of only 10-bps in the company's cost ratio isn't a verdict on the effeciency of its AI plans. The use of bots, which is aimed at lowering the cost of each loan, comes alongside an ambitious branch expansion for gold loans and microfinance, which ends up raising the cost involved.
The lender's management expects the cost ratio to eventually improve by 25 to 40 basis points in FY27.
The AI Leverage
Bajaj Finance, under a strategy named "BFL 3.0 – A FINAI Company", is using AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini to reach out to new customers. AI bots appear in 77% of its promotional text messages, up from 35% in the June quarter, the investor presentation pointed out.
Behind the scenes, it ran automated quality checks on 22.8 million documents in Q2. The company says 75% of do-it-yourself customer servicing now runs through AI voice and text bots, against 65% a year ago. AI drafts all its business requirement documents, and "vibe coding", building software by prompting AI, is set to become standard practice for new ones by Q3FY27. The dedicated AI unit has grown to 328 employees from 121.
Not every experiment stuck, as per the presentation, as AI video generation fell from 0.64 million videos in Q2FY26 to 0.01 million this quarter.
Also, the scale is still modest. The Rs 2,744-crore business generation compares with consolidated assets under management of Rs 5,84,624 crore, which grew by Rs 37,680 crore in the quarter alone.
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Why The Ratio Is Stuck
Other cuts of the data are flatter than the quarter's 10 basis point improvement. For standalone, Bajaj Finance, which excludes its housing finance and broking subsidiaries, the ratio was flat at 34.2%. For the first half of FY27, the consolidated ratio was 33.2%, against 33.1% a year earlier. The company does not attribute changes in the ratio to AI.
One also needs to take into account the expenses involved in Bajaj Finance's expansion of physical footprint. The NBFC opened 321 gold loan branches in Q2, taking the total to 2,022, and grew its microfinance branches to 480 from 447. It plans 2,700-2,800 gold loan branches and 520–550 microfinance branches by the end of FY27. Gold loan assets more than doubled from a year earlier to Rs 24,195 crore.
That expansion has also increased hiring, with the company's full-time headcount rising by 2,584 in the quarter to 75,845. Excluding gold loan and microfinance hiring, the net addition was 1,058, the company said.
With regards to the AI use, Bajaj Finance's roadmap suggests the biggest returns on this front may come in lending decisions rather than costs. It says an AI model that widens the data used to assess new-to-credit and new-to-Bajaj customers went live in Q2, aimed at about 5 lakh additional accounts in sales finance.
Furthermore, an AI risk scorecard for personal loans is due in Q4, and an AI fraud-detection model in Q3. Gains, accordingly, may show up in growth and loan losses, not in the cost ratio.
ALSO READ: Bajaj Finance Q2 Results: Net Profit Rises 29%; AUM Surges To Rs 5.85 Lakh Crore
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