Around 45 minutes into Citi’s second-quarter earnings call, when talking about AI efficiencies, the bank’s chief financial officer name-dropped another executive: Tim Ryan.
Citi is counting on Ryan, the head of technology, to catapult it past an era of outdated technology and regulatory scrutiny, in part by leveraging AI. Ryan oversees the bank’s nearly $12 billion tech budget, and said his focus is on making sure Citi’s more than 220,000 employees are actually using AI tools.
To Ryan, that doesn’t mean keeping track of every AI token workers spend the bank’s money on, but rather striking the right balance between “metrics and pride.”
“What we realized very quickly is — don’t measure everything, because you’ll stifle it. You have to measure the big things, but don’t try to measure every last-mile use case, because, frankly, you’ll uninspire people if they feel like they’re being watched too much,” he told Business Insider in May.
Ryan said that philosophy reflects his belief that companies won’t win the AI race on the technology choices they make, but how people use it.
“I don’t think you’ll hear anybody stand up and say I won because I chose this LLM or this LLM,” Ryan said. “Where they will win or lose is how they bring tens and tens of thousands of people along.”
The firm has hundreds of AI use cases, and Fraser said nearly 90% of employees were using AI tools on the second-quarter earnings call. Ryan pointed to Citi’s 4,000-person peer-to-peer training program as an effective way to scale adoption, and said he’s focusing in part on scaling the use of agents in coding.
Metrics matter, but they’re not everything
Unlike some of Citi’s peers, Ryan doesn’t think that measuring employees’ granular use of AI will help scale the technology. (JPMorgan has AI dashboards for individual engineers, and Goldman Sachs tracks teams’ velocity.) Doing so, he said, risks making people feel like they’re being monitored.
“I don’t believe in life on the spectrums,” he said. “If it’s all metrics and no pride, you’re in trouble, because it’s not sustainable. If it’s all pride and no metrics, that’s not sustainable.”
That doesn’t mean Citi isn’t keeping track of its spending. The conversation around token costs is heating up across industries. Coinbase has instituted weekly price caps; Walmart has placed usage limits on an internal tool; JPMorgan’s chief financial officer said token spending will become an increasingly important question.
Ryan said Citi measures “the big things” and encourages employees to use the lowest-cost model that meets their needs, since “you don’t need a Ferrari to do some of the stuff.”
“What we can’t do is be disjointed. That’s not great leadership,” he said. “We have well-established tools in place to track our spend, and every time we do something big, there’s an ROI attached.”
Like the rest of the bank, Ryan is trimming his team. In 2024, Citi committed to cutting up to 20,000 jobs over three years as part of its sweeping “Transformation” effort. Fraser said that the bank’s head count was down to 219,000 on the second-quarter earnings call.
When asked about how he was thinking about headcount and AI, Ryan acknowledged the widespread fear among engineers across industries, but did not explicitly link job cuts to the technology. He said he’s focused on reducing the number of the bank’s contractors over full-time employees.
“What I can control is making sure we’re being smart about hiring, so we can make sure we grow into growth and minimize the number of pressure layoffs,” he said. “We’ve been incredibly open about that with our people, and while it doesn’t take the fear away, it reduces it and tries to help people focus on what they can control.”
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