Dive Brief:
- Bank of America spent $3.8 billion on new technologies last year and plans to do the same this year, as it develops and deploys generative artificial intelligence capabilities.
- “There’s always more to go,” CEO Brian Moynihan said of digital transformation, speaking during a Q4 earnings call Friday.
- “We’ve had algorithm machine learning-type models all over our company for years,” said Moynihan, pointing to the billions of dollars Bank of America has invested on “data cleanliness, data order, [and] getting the data in the right place” over the past decade.
Dive Insight:
AI-powered chatbots and digital assistants are nothing new to Bank of America’s technology suite. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender launched the virtual customer service tool Erica in 2018, added its capabilities to the CashPro commercial banking platform last year and assisted 18 million unique users in Q4, Moynihan said.
“We think that there's vast promise for AI,” Moynihan said, pointing to internal deployments to enhance productivity and assist coders.
Banking is particularly well situated to reap the benefits of generative AI advances this year, according to Accenture.
Most large banks are into their second or third cloud deployments and have the data backbone needed to support large language model technologies, Michael Abbott, senior managing director and global banking lead at Accenture, told CIO Dive.
Bank of America saw quarterly net income decline by more than 50% year over year, to $3.1 billion from $7.1 billion in Q4 2023. Consumer banking, the bank’s largest segment, generated $2.8 billion of that net income, a 22% year-over-year decline.
