Banks · Telecom Stores — the wait is the product nobody designed
A customer takes a ticket, sits down, and for the next eleven minutes the branch does nothing with their attention. Half of them are in the wrong queue anyway. MijA stands where the tickets are taken, works out what the customer came for, points them at the right counter, and turns the wait into something other than a wait.
What goes wrong on this floor
- A customer queues for a teller when what they needed was the loan desk, and finds out eleven minutes later.
- Simple things that do not need a counter at all, such as a card reissue or a plan change, still consume a counter.
- Anything that hears a customer say an account number is inside your compliance perimeter, which is why most branches never put a voice assistant in the lobby at all.
How MijA actually responds
Why this industry needs on-premise
A lobby assistant will hear account numbers, card numbers and balances whether you want it to or not. The moment that audio crosses your network boundary you have widened the PCI DSS scope of a system that was never meant to be in scope, and under the GLBA Safeguards Rule you have added a service provider to oversee. MijA is processed inside the branch, on your hardware, on your network segment. The scope does not widen because nothing moves.
For European operations the DORA framework has pushed the same point since January 2025. Every critical ICT third party is a dependency you have to map, test and be able to exit. Hardware you already own is not a third party dependency. On top of that, from 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act requires an AI to say that it is an AI, and MijA does so before the conversation starts. She does not identify customers, does not score them and does not infer their mood.
How it is deployed
One MijA unit beside the ticket machine, facing the entrance, on an isolated network segment with read access to queue status only. No connection to core banking is required and none is recommended. Telecom stores usually place her at the display wall instead, where the questions are about plans rather than counters.