This Wall Street bank has over 100 "digital employees"
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They have performance reviews. Human managers. Email addresses. Logins. But they're not human. BNY Mellon says it has over 100 digital employees working on everything from payment remediation to engineering and code repair.
Why it matters: The bank's AI strategy is among the most aggressive on Wall Street as it seeks to increase productivity and enhance profits, though the firm says AI will not affect headcount.
What they're saying: "I understand very much that people view head count changes as the consequence of AI adoption. We don't think about it that way," BNY CEO Robin Vince said after the bank reported its earnings yesterday.
- "We think of it as a superpower, and we want all of our people and the whole company to be equipped with that superpower," he said on a call.
- He cited a recent MIT study which found 95% of companies building AI get no return from investment from it, arguing that BNY is an exception.
Zoom out: Still, the natural concern is that digital employees will eventually replace human ones, which the company denies.
- Some analysts say BNY's use of AI could help the firm update code.
- As BNY is working to bring costs down, "one area that still needs to see investment is technology spending," writes Gerard Cassidy, head of U.S. bank equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. He estimates this spending could land between $3.7 billion to $4 billion for 2025.
Zoom in: What exactly is a digital employee and how does it work?
- Unlike an AI agent built to perform one specific task, a "digital employee" can be a bundle of agents running autonomously or semi-autonomously.
- The bank describes this bundling as a solution, but digital employees go a step further. The solution is wrapped with a login ID and email so "it can essentially operate as a human would inside the environment," Vince said.
State of play: BNY has access to all the major large language models via its AI platform called Eliza. The hope is that by giving human employees access to LLMs, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, they will use them in their daily lives, and employee adoption will increase.
- The pace of innovation is outpacing AI adoption industrywide, Dermot McDonogh, chief financial officer at BNY, said on the media call, though almost 100% of BNY employees have had AI training on Eliza.
The bottom line: BNY is working to position itself as an early and passionate AI adopter.
