NEW YORK–When it comes to technology, for many CUs the strategy is to be fast-followers, so they may want to pay attention to the latest plans from one bank even if it has a tech budget larger than the asset size of all but a handful of CUs.
Bank of America’s newly appointed chief technology and information officer Hari Gopalkrishnan is offering some insights into how it plans to spend that $13-billion budget. Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is a big part of the focus.
Gopalkrishnan told the Wall Street Journal that in 2025, $4 billion of that $13 billion has been set aside for developing new technologies like artificial intelligence.
Plans include building more job-specific AI features for employees and serving more personalized financial information to customers, the Journal reported.
Consumers Want Specific Offers
“When it comes to things like insights and alerts, I want to see something that’s specific to me. I don’t want to see the generalized offer,” he told the Journal, referring to existing features on the Bank of America app that can, for example, alert a member if their regular gym membership overcharges them.
Gopalkrishnan told the publication he would also aim not to overspend or overengineer with unnecessary features. “This isn’t cheap stuff. You’re using GPUs that are not commodity,” he said, referring to Nvidia’s pricey AI chips, the Journal stated. “You’re using money and resources in the cloud that are not cheap,” he said.
More Than 1,400 Patent Applications
BofA has applied for about 1,400 AI patents, more than half of which have been granted so far. Its client-facing AI chatbot Erica recently surpassed three-billion interactions since its 2018 rollout, according to the Journal report, and the employee version, rolled out in 2020, is now used by more than 90% of the bank’s 213,000 employees.
The bank declined to comment to the Journal about how usage has translated into bottom line savings and revenue so far, but the banke expects the returns to meaningfully materialize for the sector in 2026 and 2027.
Gopalkrishnan oversees a staff of 60,000 and succeeds Aditya Bhasin who will retire from the bank and take a new outside opportunity, according to an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
A ‘Lot More Opportunity’
“Beyond the general purpose Erica tool, there is a lot more opportunity with AI, especially when it comes to job-specific productivity tools and tools aimed at fully automating complex workflows—still keeping a human in the loop to double check outputs, Gopalkrishnan said,” the Journal reported. “The bank has already built some of these. For example, on the commercial banking side, it has an AI tool that generates draft prep documents for bankers ahead of client meetings. Previously, bankers had to navigate various systems, including the client’s portfolio, transactions, customer relationship management software as well as third-party research—a process which could take a junior banker hours or days.”
One Response
“If your strategy has been to be a fast follower, you are aspiring to be average.” Rich Jones, Principal/Founder of Leading2Leadership LLC.