What is the Bank of America CEO's AI Vision?

Financial leaders across the banking sector are evaluating the return on investment regarding artificial intelligence.

While the narrative often focuses on the technological capabilities of generative AI, the implementation of these tools acts as a significant lever for capital allocation and workforce planning.

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, has indicated that the integration of AI is less about job displacement and more about resizing the operational headcount relative to business growth.

Speaking on the This is Working podcast, the he explained that the bank is utilising new technologies to manage its workforce size through attrition rather than redundancy. This approach allows the institution to maintain efficiency without the morale impact often associated with large-scale restructuring.

This same pattern, he says, has been seen before at the inception of computers: "people wrote … in 1969 that there would be no managers left in business because the computer itself would eliminate the need for managers, because they just moved information. 

“Well, guess what? We have 20,000 managers today at Bank of America. And we were told in 1969, there was going to be no manufacturing left in the US, there were going to be no jobs left, the computers were going to take it away, that Japan was going to take over. 

“You go through all that stuff, and then we doubled the amount of people who worked in the United States in 50 years.”

Deployment of AI in banking

Bank of America is making significant investments in AI, with plans to deploy it across its wider operations.

The company was one of the first in the banking industry to develop its own digital assistant, which was piloted in 2017 and rolled out in 2018.

This assistant, named Erica, is available to both customers and internally, automating HR, IT and administrative tasks. 

There is little room for mistakes, however, with the chatbot being designed to prioritise accuracy above all else. 

Nikki Katz, Head of Digital at Bank of America, told American Banker: "When I go to ChatGPT and I'm looking to aggregate the best soccer programs for my kid in town, precision and accuracy matter a lot less," compared to banking, where there's "no room for error. So it's not as free-form as what people are used to. But that's by design, because of the application."

To achieve this, the bank hired people with PhDs in linguistics to work with their software developers, to ensure the chatbot was able to understand wholly what customers and employees were asking of it. 

Competing for technology talent

To prepare for its AI growth, Bank of America is prioritising hiring talent that has experience with emerging technologies and younger talent that can be trained up in AI – but the competition is high.

In an interview with CBS News, Moynihan says that the company had hired 2,000 Gen Z candidates from a pool of 200,000 people.

When discussing young people's views on the impact of AI on work, he says: "If you ask them if they're scared, they say they are. And I understand that. But I say, harness it … It'll be your world ahead of you."

Moynihan says that the bank wants "to drive more growth" from its AI investments, saying that "the efficiencies from AI will be spent to keep growing the company".