Digital workers at US bank to get their own email accounts

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents at the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) have company logins, and will soon have access to their own email accounts.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the firm’s IT boss said that “digital workers”, as she described them, already have direct managers and, as well as having email accounts, may soon be able to communicate with the bank’s staff using tools such as Microsoft Teams.

According to the report, BNY chief information officer Leigh-Ann Russell said this could be months away. “This is the next level,” she told WSJ. “I’m sure in six months’ time it will become very, very prevalent.” 

The finance sector is adopting AI in its various forms to transform how they operate, and the use of terms such as “digital workers”, used by BNY, means human staff numbers will fall.

Chris Skinner, fintech industry expert and CEO at The Finanser, said Russell’s words highlight the issues financial institutions have known for years. “Going way back when, a CEO of an insurance firm said to me that they had raised a generation of ‘box tickers and button pushers’,” he said. “Back in 2017, John Cryan, the then CEO of Deutsche Bank, said banks have ‘people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people’.”

He said BNY’s stance is not a surprise, beyond the fact “that it has taken this long to become reality”. “By way of example, I was saying that 80% to 90% of bank branches would be redundant in the future,” he added. “That was in the 1990s. It just took another 25 years to become reality. These changes are predictable. What it means is that you need to focus upon the future jobs, not the ones that will be lost.”

Bloomberg Intelligence recently put the number of jobs set to be replaced by AI in the US finance sector – Wall Street specifically – at hundreds of thousands. CIOs questioned by the organisation expected 3% of their workforce to be cut on average. Around a quarter of respondents expect the workforce to be cut by between 5% and 10% as AI takes over roles, with the back and middle offices to be most affected.

According to research by banking industry benchmarking firm Evident, AI-related roles could be the only “safe jobs” in the banking sector as financial organisations “relentlessly” press on with AI-led transformation.

Its banking industry report found that recruitment of AI development professionals grew by 6% in the past year; hiring of data engineers increased by 14%; and the number of AI and software implementation experts hired increased by 42%.

Staff that remain must also learn to work with these “digital workers”.

Senior leaders at banks are being trained to prepare for the changes brought by the adoption of AI in banking. For example, Lloyds Banking Group is training 200 of its senior leaders to ensure the organisation can get the most out of the technology. The bank is working with training provider Cambridge Spark on the programme, which will embed AI skills into the leadership ranks. Senior executives will receive 80 hours of training, known as Leading with AI.

Recent Bank of England research found that three-quarters of banks are already using some form of AI in their operations. It revealed that some of the most common early use cases for AI have been “fairly low-risk from a financial stability standpoint”. For example, the Bank of England survey found that 41% are using AI to optimise internal processes, while 26% are using AI to enhance customer support. However, it said many firms are now using AI to mitigate the external risks they face from cyber attack (37%), fraud (33%) and money laundering (20%).