Why this bank is hiring full-time AI employees

Banks are embracing the AI workforce—but some institutions are taking unexpected approaches to its deployment.

The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) has dozens of so-called digital employees working alongside its human counterparts. And distinguishing those AI-driven colleagues might become more difficult in the months ahead.

Rather than quietly working in the background, digital workers are integrated into the broader BNY team—and soon they’ll have their own email accounts and ability to participate in Microsoft Teams meetings. Whereas many companies are still working to determine how best to incorporate AI into their day-to-day operations, BNY has embraced it in the form of digital staffers who work under the auspices of human supervisors.

There are, per The Wall Street Journal, two separate AI personas the bank has built: One focuses on coding; the other is dedicated to validating payment instructions. Each persona is deployed across specific teams, with data access siloed for security reasons. New personas, which will specialize in different areas, are in the works now.

These aren’t digital assistants. Armed with individual login credentials, NBY’s AI workers can access the same tools as human workers. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they’re able to write and implement a patch (though it must first be approved by a human manager).

In the future, BNY aims to give its digital workforce access to email and Microsoft Teams, enabling the AI to contact human managers when it faces a problem it can’t resolve on its own.

While other banks are utilizing AI, most still use the technology as a far less empowered support tool for the human workforce. For example, earlier this month Goldman Sachs launched the GS AI Assistant, an AI program that lets workers across its divisions communicate with large language models for efficiency gains. The tool offers coding suggestions, translates foreign languages, and summarizes complex documents for workers. That’s a far cry from the semi-independent state of BNY’s digital workers, and the tasks it undertakes are much more mundane.

Despite its innovative tech, BNY emphasized to The Wall Street Journal that it’s not adopting an AI-first approach. Human hiring is not slowing down at present, even as more AI workers are developed.

That’s understandable. Several companies that have gone all-in on AI have scaled back those efforts and resumed hiring humans amid pushback from customers who don’t want human jobs to be assumed by AI.

“The possibility that AI tools might completely take over tasks previously handled by humans, rather than just assist with them, stirs up deep concerns and worries,” wrote Harvard University marketing professor Julian De Freitas earlier this year. 

There’s some rationale behind those concerns. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last month that he believed AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, a move that he said could cause unemployment to spike to between 10% and 20%.

He’s not the only one sounding an alarm. In April, Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, warned that AI is increasingly putting entry-level jobs under threat. And there are a growing number of stories from workers who saw their six-figure-earning jobs disappear without notice, bringing chaos to their lives.

Meanwhile, venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee has called predictions that AI will displace 50% of jobs by 2027 “uncannily accurate.” 

But for BNY, the AI revolution is, at present, more about adding to the workforce without inflating the company’s payroll budget. And as a bonus, these coworkers won’t take the last cup of coffee from the break room either.