NEW YORK–The Bank of New York Mellon reported it is now “employing” dozens of artificial intelligence-powered “digital employees” that have their own company logins and that work alongside its human staff.
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell, told the Wall Street Journal.
In the near future they will also have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, according to a bank spokesperson, who said within six months the bank expects the AI tech to be “very, very prevalent.”
The Wall Street Journal noted that what the bank is calling “digital workers” is called “AI agents” by other institutions.
Increasingly Replicating Humans
“Others aren’t necessarily taking the same approach of granting their AI full logins, but many say that they are shaping AI into applications that increasingly replicate the capabilities and workflows of human employees, taking on more and more tasks in areas like the software development life cycle and research,” according to the Journal.
According to the report, BNY said it took three months for its AI Hub to spin up two digital employee personas: one designed to clean up vulnerabilities in code and one designed to validate payment instructions.
“Each persona can exist in a few dozen instances, and each instance is assigned to work narrowly within a particular team,” a spokesperson said, adding that that way no digital employee has broad access to information across the company.
“Because they have their own logins, and can directly access the same apps as human employees, they can work autonomously,” the spokesperson explained to the Journal. “For example, a digital engineer can log into company systems and see there’s a vulnerability that needs to be patched, write the new code to patch it, and then pass it on to a human manager for approval in the system.”
Can Contact Managers
BNY said it’s aiming to grant its digital workforce access to more enterprise communication systems, such as email and Microsoft Teams, allowing them to proactively contact their human managers for issues they can’t solve, the report added.