Exclusive: BNY CEO tells incoming analysts to embrace AI
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BNY CEO Robin Vince is encouraging the bank's incoming analysts to experiment with AI and question whether it can make their work easier, according to a welcome letter shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: As financial analysts ranks among the jobs viewed as vulnerable to AI displacement, at least one bank is encouraging employees to embrace the technology rather than fear it.
What they're saying: "Bring your ideas, experiment with technology like AI and lean in to help a colleague," Vince wrote in the letter to BNY's incoming analyst class.
- Vince told them to stay curious and question existing processes: "Could it be simpler or better, and could AI help make it easier?"
- He also encouraged the new analysts to use their fresh eyes to their advantage and look for ways teams could do things differently or more efficiently.
Vince is one of two public company CEOs recently added to OpenAI's board of directors.
- In an April interview, he told Axios that unless you're an AI producer or power user that deeply embeds AI across the firm "you're going to have a real problem."
- The bank has over 140 autonomous digital employees as well as a proprietary AI platform, called Eliza, named after the wife of Alexander Hamilton, the bank's founder.
- Eliza is model agnostic and routes queries to the best tool for the task.
Zoom out: Vince's letter comes amid a precarious moment for the role of financial analysts within banks, who primarily research and cover a set of public companies within a given sector.
- Researchers from both Stanford and Anthropic have pointed to financial analysts as one of the careers most at risk of displacement due to AI.
- "Half of what they do today goes away, but...the part of the job that involves humans talking to other humans" will be "really important," Joshua Pantony, co-founder of Boosted.ai, an AI investment platform, told Axios.
Yes, but: Vince told Axios he sees AI as a "capacity creator," adding that "we believe that the nature of the world, the nature of humanity, is that we want to be a people-powered organization."
- In his letter to analysts, he also emphasized this, saying "Performance and ambition matter, but how you treat people in the everyday moments says a great deal about your character."
The bottom line: For BNY's newest analysts, AI is framed not as competition but as a tool to be put to work.
