“We’re going deeper into the financial life of retail customers across Uzbekistan. So we’re building out vertical by vertical into different products,” Oliver Hughes, head of international business at TBC Group, said in an exclusive interview.
Hughes told TechCrunch that the group hired AI experts who built AI assistant Alice for Russia’s Yandex. These experts have built a finance-specific LLM based on Meta’s Llama that understands local nuances and local languages, including Uzbek, the executive said.
While Hughes did not disclose the exact capital the group is specifically putting into its AI effort, he said that “a material portion of the money raised will be going to the AI projects, but still, the overwhelming majority will be for building and scaling” its business and consumer products.