Bank of America: More than 90% of its employees now use AI

Bank of America says it is seeing results from its artificial intelligence efforts, with most of its 213,000 employees using the company's virtual assistant or other forms of AI.

By answering employees' questions, the assistant, Erica for Employees, has reduced calls to the IT help desk by more than half, the bank said. More than 90% of employees use Erica, the bank said.

The company has also quietly rolled out generative AI in areas like Merrill Lynch, private banking and call centers, to help advisors and relationship bankers answer questions and draft client memos and to generate summaries of calls for customer service reps.

While other large banks have been public about their use of AI, especially generative AI, throughout their organizations, Bank of America has been mostly silent.

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others have set up portals through which employees can use large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT to help them with their work.

Bank of America has not talked about this openly to date. But in an interview, Hari Gopalkrishnan, head of consumer, business and wealth management technology, said the bank has been working with all the foundation model providers (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, Cohere and AWS) "at a very deep level."

Gopalkrishnan declined to share names of specific companies the bank is working with.

Bank of America is also working with open source models, he said.

"When we think about build versus buy, we don't want to be building things that are increasingly foundational and are available as a commodity," Gopalkrishnan said. "We want to leverage the heck out of innovation happening in the industry. We want to leverage the heck out of partnerships we have that are investing tons of money in the space that said they have to eventually fit in with our framework."

The company spends $13 billion annually on technology; about $4 billion of that will be directed to new technology initiatives in 2025.

"I do think it is a good idea to use generative AI with employees first, as they are going to use it anyway, and it is a good way to make sure that IT stays in the loop," said consultant Aaron McPherson. "Erica now seems prescient, given the way things have evolved. Other banks are playing catchup with their own chatbots." However, some of the other improvements Bank of America is reporting appear to be common among other large banks, he said.

Not using generative AI in client-facing Erica

Like many banks, Bank of America uses traditional artificial intelligence, but not yet generative AI, in client-facing situations, such as where customers use its Erica virtual assistant. The risks of hallucination and error are still too great to let gen AI make up answers and feed them to people with no intervention, many executives say. In a survey American Banker conducted last year, among banks that have deployed generative AI, only 23% said they use it for direct client or customer communications.

"We just want a predictable response to a client," Gopalkrishnan said. "There's no reason to have a model write an essay when we're just trying to send the client to the right place."

Erica, which was one of the first virtual assistants in the industry in 2018, is based on natural language understanding that interprets what a customer is saying and deciphering the intent of what that person wants. It uses language models to classify content. Today, 20 million customers use Erica at least once a month.

Erica continues to be refined and get better over time, Gopalkrishnan said. "We essentially improve our classification schemes based upon all the knowledge we learn every single day. We have call centers that process calls. We have people that actually talk into Erica every single day. We use all that to glean better classification."

Erica for Employees, the version of Erica given to staff, was widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic by employees seeking technology support for things like mobile device password reset and device activation. In 2023, it was expanded to be able to help with HR topics like where to review health benefits and locate payroll and tax forms.

Gen AI for Merrill Lynch, research and elsewhere

The bank is adopting generative AI in other areas. In the Merrill Lynch unit, advisors can use a generative AI tool called "Ask Merrill" to run queries on behalf of customers, such as how to do estate planning in Delaware. In 2024, there were more than 23 million interactions with Ask Merrill and a similar tool, Ask Private Banking, an increase of 1 million over 2023, according to the bank.

Bank of America is also using generative AI to help relationship bankers draft client memos, using data from the customer relationship management system, transaction details, market commentary and other documents and data.

"In doing so, we save hours of time for a relationship banker," Gopalkrishnan said.

Artificial intelligence

Rise of 'shadow AI' presents dilemmas for tech leaders

April 3, 2025 3:30 PM

Bank of America uses AI to provide interactive coaching through conversation simulators that enable teammates to practice different types of client interactions and get real-time feedback. Employees completed over one million simulations last year.

Software developers are using a gen AI-based tool to assist with code writing and optimization, through which they have experienced efficiency gains of over 20%, the bank said.

An internally developed generative AI platform enables the global markets sales and trading team to search, summarize, and synthesize internal research and market commentary more quickly and efficiently.

In all these projects, the bank has a framework around responsible AI, he said, through which it looks at things like, bias, fairness and transparency, Gopalkrishnan said.

"It has to fit in with that framework," he said. "And if it does, we absolutely are partnering with all those players. We don't talk a lot about it. We just focus on, what do clients want to do? What are the client-facing solutions we want to deliver, and we talk more about that."