Bank of America plans $4 billion "technology initiatives" spend
"AI has moved from cost-savings ideas to enhancing the quality of our customer interactions" says CEO.
Bank of America plans to spend $4 billion on “technology initiatives” in 2024, including generative AI projects – approximately a third of CTIO Aditya Bhasin and his team’s $12 billion annual technology budget.
That’s according to the bank’s CEO Brian T. Moynihan on a Q2 earnings call this week. He also highlighted the scale of the bank’s digital capabilities – its consumer mobile banking application, for example, serves more than 47 million active users, who logged in 3.5 billion times this quarter.
Bank of America AI: "Insights" for outreach
“We have focused projects around our Artificial Intelligence enhancements with both clients and our teammates. A recent example of our use of AI is our Advisor and Client Insights tools,” BoA’s CEO said.
That has generated over six million insights to the bank’s financial advisors “providing them proactive reason to engage with clients” said Moynihan.
He added bullishly on the July 16 earnings call that “AI has moved from cost-savings ideas to enhancing the quality of our customer interactions.”
The numbers were revealed as a new forecast by Gartner on July 16 predicted that global IT spending would hit $5.26 trillion in 2024.
“"The change fatigue in CIOs that we saw at the start of the year has now abated and the contract backlogs going back to the third quarter of 2023 are being cleared. We expect to see a larger rush towards the end of the year to make up for the slow start," said Gartner’s John-David Lovelock.
(Reflecting on those numbers, Matt Pepper, from workflow optimisation specialist WalkMe, noted to The Stack: "Adding AI co-pilots... can provide significant returns, but only if employees find these tools actually improve their words and remove, instead of adding, complexity. Our research found employees at large organisations are given more than two hundred different applications to use – including almost fifty AI-powered apps. To ensure new capabilities are successful, organisations need to truly understand how they interact with the way employees work...”)
Bank of America was an early machine learning and chatbot adopter with its home-grown Erica digital assistant – which now serves 19.6 million users who made 167 million interactions over the quarter, a presentation showed – and the bank tout its innovation prowess; it has nearly 6,600 granted patents and pending applications, with 644 awarded in 2023.
A striking 28% of those were in information security where the bank continues to hire widely, including for “Purple Team” engineers.
It is also seeking data scientists to help, per one advert, “prepare data for analytics: clean, design, move, and test huge data stores (files, tables on Teradata or Hadoop or UNIX file system)...” Not everything is AI-ready.
