Despite its 240-year pedigree, BNY isn’t showing its age.
Under CEO Robin Vince, who took the reins in 2022, the firm — founded by Alexander Hamilton — is aggressively embracing AI. Recently, it has begun entrusting some managers with oversight of a contingent of new workers who don’t even require a chair: the digital employee.
“All digital employees report to a human manager,” Vince said in an interview with Business Insider this month in Palm Beach.
These digital employees create a layered effect with the company’s agentic products, in which a single entity coordinates the activities of multiple individual agents. The digital workforce is more than 140 agents strong, each one with roughly two dozen skills, give or take, comprising their suite of abilities.
And, just like humans, they’re held accountable for their work — with performance reviews.
After executing a variety of tasks humans might find tedious, the digital employee presents it to “the human who’s responsible for the process — ‘I’ve just done three quarters of the work for you. And by the way, I did it in 10 minutes instead of what would have otherwise been two weeks,” the CEO explained.
About 100 managers across the firm oversee digital employees, including Rachel Lewis, a managing director and a two-decade BNY veteran who now serves as head of AI enablement for operations. Appointed to the role this year, Lewis is now helping teams across the bank build and deploy digital employees within their day-to-day workflows.
“We’re kind of transferring the mundane to the machines,” she said, describing how the tools are taking over routine processes and shifting how work gets done.
Lewis told Business Insider she works closely with teams across BNY to help them develop their own digital employees — often starting with ideas that come directly from the people doing the work and turning them into tools over time.
“The person that came up with that idea actually gets the opportunity to build that digital employee,” she said. As teams begin to incorporate them into their workflows, she added, the technology starts to feel less like software and more like part of the team. “It’s just almost having a virtual teammate as part of your group.”
170,000 hours of training
To prepare for the AI age, BNY implemented a massive 170,000-hour AI training program for its 48,000 staffers. “Everyone in the company has done two to three hours,” he said. The goal was to turn employees into a new class of supervisors who managed, rather than competed with, the machine. “We’re investing in our people, because I want them to be the unlockers and users of AI,” Vince added.
Last week, he sent a memo to several thousand of the firm’s senior leaders pointing to some of the firm’s past efforts in AI and encouraging them to be proactive in continuing to incorporate it. “We have an obligation to our company to capture this opportunity,” Vince wrote in the email, whose subject line was “Reimagining BNY.”
“This is a fundamental leadership shift, not simply a capability shift,” he added. “It will require each of us to lean in and role-model how to engage with AI and how to harness it to solve problems.”
Speaking to Business Insider, Vince described his first personal deep dive into AI as a “summer project” that kicked off in 2023 and never ended.
It was sparked by a YouTube video he saw that broke down the functionality of Tesla’s Autopilot 12. He watched as the car observed human behavior and applied what it saw to navigating a stop sign, rather than adhering to a few rigid lines of code. “It was very clear to me that the future of AI was going to be learning to make decisions,” Vince said. He wanted to bring that same adaptive intelligence to the bank. “It was highly applicable to our businesses,” he added, “and it would be able to be a very fundamental input to how we actually ran the company.”
Expanding the digital workforce
While some of the earliest digital employees have applications focused on straightforward fixes like data repair and data capture, Lewis said the tools that have stood out most are those that make it easier for employees to build and refine their own digital employees.
Building a digital employee starts with observing how work is actually done. Teams record themselves completing tasks step by step, allowing the system to analyze different approaches and identify the most efficient way to perform the work. That output is then used to generate the instructions that guide a digital employee, which are refined over time as teams train the system on new variations of the task.
Lewis said that as digital employees become embedded in workflows, teams are also treating them more like members of the workforce. “There is a performance review,” she said.
Managers evaluate how the systems perform by reviewing outputs, identifying where they skip tasks or “didn’t perform as expected,” and feeding that work back into the system to be retrained on new variations and edge cases.
“We’re continuously monitoring them,” she added. “Every week it gets a little bit better.”
Even as it expands its digital workforce, Vince said there are no plans to cut back on human capital; these tools, he said, are meant to supercharge their workflow, but not take responsibilities out of their hands. “I speak to CEOs who say, ‘We’re going to downsize, massively, our campus program.'” Vince’s reply? “Why would you do that?”
“We’ve got the opportunity to have young people who are pre-trained in AI, enthusiastic, and be able to add to our business in different ways,” he said.
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