From Reuters, November 17:
- BofA plans $4 billion in new tech investments, focusing on AI
- Gopalkrishnan says AI boosts productivity, allows bankers to cover more clients
- He says BofA focused on reskilling employees instead of cutting jobs
Bank of America (BAC.N) plans to spend billions of dollars on technologies such as artificial intelligence to boost bankers' productivity and bring in more revenue, its chief technology and information officer said on Monday.
BofA plans to allocate $4 billion into new technology capabilities from its $13 billion tech budget, the company told investors earlier this month. It plans to use AI more widely across all its businesses.
"How many clients can a given relationship banker cover if you're able to actually automate that process using AI," such as preparing client briefing documents before meetings, Hari Gopalkrishnan, who took over the role at BofA in July, said at the Reuters Momentum AI Finance conference in New York. "You now can have a banker cover 50 clients instead of 15. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the real world."
In wealth management, the second-biggest U.S. lender sends AI-generated market information to its financial advisers, combined with data on clients' portfolios, so that bankers can better tailor their investment advice, he said.
The bank's 18,000 developers have been using AI agents for the last year, and observed "significant gains" in productivity to automate or speed up mundane tasks, including streamlining some software tests by 90%.
"Our teams are looking at growth, and we're in the process of strategic planning for the next three years, and you see much more aggressive objectives," Gopalkrishnan said. "These tools are now taking flight."
Earlier this year, larger rival JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) said AI tools enabled it to boost sales to wealthy clients and manage scores of requests during April's market rout. Goldman Sachs (GS.N) is rolling out a generative AI assistant to its bankers, traders and asset managers, while Morgan Stanley (MS.N) developed a chatbot for its financial advisers with OpenAI.
BofA's virtual assistant, Erica, has done work for customers that would have otherwise required 11,000 employees, he said, including routine requests like ordering checks or disputing transactions....
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Meanwhile, American Banker (Nov. 17) led with:
'Revenue opportunities everywhere': BofA's tech chief on AI
- Key insight: Bank of America is directly connecting increased revenue and decreased cost to AI.
- What's at stake: Operational costs and competitive advantage hinge on successful AI integration.
- Supporting data: Erica has processed three billion customer interactions, replacing the equivalent of 11,000 staff.
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review....
And goes a bit deeper than Reuters:
...."Every time you make Zelle payments, we run two AI-based models to figure out if it's you, if it's the right amount, are you sending it to the right people?" Gopalkrishnan said. "That's all automated through AI that's been in production for a couple of years and is working, and we have significantly reduced our fraud losses."
To protect against the danger of hallucination and error, Bank of America has a process by which it looks at 16 different dimensions of risk in these models, including hallucinations, ethics and privacy.....
....MUCH MORE
