AI & Data Science
The AI & Data Science module covers all CNB innovations in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) and its testing and application in day-to-day operations, with a focus on streamlining and simplifying routine tasks, freeing up expert capacity for strategic, conceptual and complex assignments and ensuring security and the protection of sensitive data. It also includes innovative projects in the area of economic data analysis.
Implementing AI at the CNB
Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to make routine and time-consuming work easier for people. It enables them to devote more time to creative activities and strategic thinking. As a result, it can open up entirely new possibilities across many fields of human activity – including (central) banking.
AI also has its place at the CNB. In 2024, the central bank purchased its first several dozen licences for the generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT Team. Since then, it has significantly expanded the range of available AI tools – from Copilot Chat for all employees to highly advanced models used by selected experts to perform specific tasks or to test AI capabilities in various areas (see, for example, the blog article First use of AI in inflation forecasting at the CNB). “A great idea for using artificial intelligence was born during one of my breakfast meetings with CNB staff. Since then, we’ve launched pilot AI projects at the bank and gradually started to incorporate AI into our everyday work as well,” says CNB Governor Aleš Michl, who believes that programming with the help of AI is also key.
One specific example of using AI in fulfilling the central bank’s tasks was its supporting role in processing applications for authorisation to provide crypto-asset services under the EU’s MiCA Regulation. The CNB received 258 such applications in 2025, the highest number in the EU. AI tools assisted experts primarily with reviewing the content of documents, identifying inconsistencies between the materials submitted and detecting missing information. They thus provided important support in meeting deadlines when coping with such a heavy workload. However, the final decision to grant or deny a licence was, of course, still made by the relevant CNB experts.
The CNB has also made significant progress in upgrading its hardware. In February 2026, it put into operation a Dell PowerEdge XE7740 server equipped with four state-of-the-art NVIDIA H200 AI graphics processing units (GPUs) within its internal IT infrastructure. Moreover, the server was further expanded with four additional NVIDIA H200 GPUs in October 2026. However, this is not the final stage. The CNB plans to expand its AI hardware capacity even further in 2027.
In autumn 2025, the CNB began testing large language models (LLMs) using an NVIDIA H100 GPU on a loaned server. The aim was to verify whether this technology could be used to accelerate and streamline the operation of LLMs already used internally by the CNB.
The test results indicated a significant increase in speed and output quality. The CNB therefore decided to permanently expand its own AI infrastructure with a Dell PowerEdge XE7740 server containing four NVIDIA H200 AI GPUs. The server was put into operation in February 2026 with the aim of accelerating and streamlining the LLMs, and using AI for tasks and tests for which the previous technology was insufficient. The fact that the central bank operates this advanced AI infrastructure within its own, fully controlled environment is also important. This ensures a higher level of security and also enables work with sensitive data.
In spring 2026, the CNB launched an internal chat platform, CNB AI Chat (OpenWebUI), for all employees. The platform does not require programming skills to use, making it as user-friendly to staff as publicly available tools such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. Unlike these cloud-based platforms, however, conversations, documents and other data remain within the secure internal CNB environment. All processing takes place on the CNB’s own LLM server.
CNB AI Chat offers users the Qwen3.5-122B-A10B model (in two modes – “instant” and “thinking”) and the GPT-OSS 120B model, which differ in their characteristics (how fast and up to date they are, multimodal capabilities, analytical capabilities, etc.). In addition, since September 2026, all CNB employees have had access – within CNB AI Chat – to the HR Bot, an AI chatbot that helps answer human resources questions.
In addition to serving standard users, who can use CNB AI Chat to interact with internal language models, including uploading documents, the platform enables selected advanced users to create custom models and response assistants based on a dedicated knowledge base.
In addition to its internal AI tools, the CNB introduced Microsoft Copilot Chat for all employees in mid-2025 and acquired ChatGPT Enterprise licences for selected experts to test advanced generative AI capabilities across organisational units.
In addition, the CNB is testing other AI tools – for example, Claude by Anthropic and Gemini by Google. Analysts, programmers and data scientists also have access to the data analysis environment known as the Data Science Laboratory (see below for details). Within this environment, it is possible to test the practical benefits of different AI approaches for the purposes of economic research and data analysis.
Coordination across organisational units also plays an important role in developing AI in a large organisation such as the CNB. This coordination was initially handled by the Coordination Group for AI, but in August 2026 the Bank Board established an AI Division within the Information Systems Department.
This is a team of specialists whose main task is to define the CNB’s AI-related needs, design the CNB’s AI architecture, coordinate implementation and promote the sharing of best practices across departments. In cooperation with individual organisational units, the AI Division ensures the effective rollout of AI within the central bank, eliminates duplicate initiatives and connects individual departments with the IT teams responsible for technical support and security. The AI Division also defines the framework and direction of AI initiatives across the CNB to ensure that the activities of other teams are coordinated and support a unified strategy.
Data Science Laboratory
The Data Science Laboratory (also referred to as DSLab or the CNB Shared Data Laboratory) is a shared environment for conducting data analysis and economic research, as well as performing advanced analytical machine learning/AI tasks using Python, R, MATLAB and VBA. The DSLab project is part of the CNB Lab innovation hub, where it forms one of the pillars of the AI & Data Science module dedicated to AI and innovative approaches to economic data analysis.
- The environment was made available to CNB employees in its initial phase in December 2024.
- Logical separation of computing capacity for individual users is ensured through container technology (Podman).
- Shared group drives and the GitLab versioning system allow users working on the same tasks to share code and data.
- Thanks to centralised administration and regular software security scans, DSLab provides a guaranteed, supported and secure solution for working with data analysis languages (Python/R/MATLAB/VBA).
- DSLab enables programmers to interact with internally hosted LLMs via an OpenAI-compatible API (REST API).