BNY Mellon Leads Wall Street in AI Adoption with Over 100 'Digital Employees'

Over 100 "digital employees" work at this Wall Street bank

Why it matters: The bank's AI strategy is among the most aggressive on Wall Street as it seeks to increase productivity and enhance profits, though the firm says AI will not affect headcount. What they're saying: "I understand very much that people view head count changes as the consequence of AI adoption. We don't think about it that way," BNY CEO Robin Vince said after the bank reported its earnings yesterday. * "We think of it as a superpower, and we want all of our people and the whole company to be equipped with that superpower," he said on a call. * He cited a recent MIT study which found 95% of companies building AI get no return from investment from it, arguing that BNY is an exception. Zoom out: Still, the natural concern is that digital employees will eventually replace human ones, which the company denies. * Some analysts say BNY's use of AI could help the firm update code. * As BNY is working to bring costs down, "one area that still needs to see investment is technology spending," writes Gerard Cassidy, head of U.S. bank equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. He estimates this spending could land between $3.7 billion to $4 billion for 2025. Zoom in: What exactly is a digital employee and how does it work? * Unlike an AI agent built to perform one specific task, a "digital employee" can be a bundle of agents running autonomously or semi-autonomously. * The bank describes this bundling as a solution, but digital employees go a step further. The solution is wrapped with a login ID and email so "it can essentially operate as a human would inside the environment," Vince said. State of play: BNY has access to all the major large language models via its AI platform called Eliza. The hope is that by giving human employees access to LLMs, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, they will use them in their daily lives, and employee adoption will increase. * The pace of innovation is outpacing AI adoption industrywide, Dermot McDonogh, chief financial officer at BNY, said on the media call, though almost 100% of BNY employees have had AI training on Eliza. The bottom line: BNY is working to position itself as an early and passionate AI adopter.

BNY Accelerates Deployment of AI Solutions and Agents | PYMNTS.com

The bank now has 117 AI solutions in production and more than 100 AI agents in use, BNY CEO Robin Vince said Thursday (Oct. 16). Speaking during the bank's quarterly earnings call, Vince said the number of AI solutions in production at the end of the third quarter was 75% higher than the number during the previous quarter. "At BNY, AI is for everyone, everywhere, and for everything," Vince said during the call. "The investments we've made have been focused on creating the technology foundation to go faster, but adoption and success are ultimately driven by culture," Vince said. The 117 AI solutions in production help with tasks like identifying new business leads, writing code, automating payment processing, accelerating client onboarding and increasing automation of reconciliation, Vince said. The AI agents are "working side-by-side with our people" on tasks like payment validations and code repairs, Vince said. "By putting AI in the hands of everyone at BNY, we intend to develop fluency and create capacity for our people to focus on higher-value work," Vince said during the call. "This translates to how we show up for our clients and innovate more broadly." In September, BNY launched the next version of its AI platform, Eliza, according to a Thursday earnings release. Vince said in the release that the latest version is "smarter, faster and easier to use." BNY launched Eliza in fiscal year 2024 and saw 36% of the bank's employees adopt the AI platform during the first year and 96% adopt it in the first half of 2025, the bank said in July. During September, BNY also teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to support research and development in AI. The BNY AI Lab will bring together BNY experts and university students, faculty and staff to develop technologies and frameworks for the governance, trust and accountability required to deploy AI applications, including those for financial services, according to a Sept. 11 press release. "By bringing together CMU's academic leadership and BNY's market expertise, we will advance AI research, responsible governance and deployment," Vince said during Thursday's earnings call.