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In the face of critics who contend that artificial intelligence will kill jobs, the top executive at The Bank of New York Mellon on Monday defended the firm’s decision to embrace the technology, arguing that AI allows companies to invest in new jobs and new markets.
The adoption of AI, according to BNY CEO Robin Vince, creates capacity for knowledge-based work that will create positive operating leverage for the companies that choose to deploy it. The more firms embrace AI, the faster they will grow, and the more people they will employ, he said.
BNY has been vocal in recent years about its decision to lean into AI. Industry-wide and beyond, the rise of AI has generated concern that large numbers of human workers will be replaced.
“I don’t think it’s just words,” Vince said at a panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s annual conference, referring to his belief that savings from AI will allow companies to make additional investments. “I think when you can save in one place, it allows you to be able to do more.”
Vince wasn’t the only panelist expressing support for AI’s potential. Each wave of technological advancement creates angst around the possibility that the technology will result in massive unemployment, said Jenny Johnson, the CEO of asset management firm Franklin Templeton.
“It’s happened every time in history, and for some reason we always figure out something new,” Johnson said Monday. “Once you get the tools in people’s hands, I think we’re going to find … things that we never understood we needed that we’re suddenly not going to be able to live without.”
In its recent first-quarter earnings materials, BNY provided certain numbers around the results of its AI deployment.
The $562 billion-asset company, which started building the foundation of its AI infrastructure four years ago, said that it increased its software releases by more than 10% in the first quarter compared with the same quarter last year. In addition, BNY was able to increase the completion of certain onboarding processes for corporate clients by more than 20% year over year, it said.
During the first quarter, more than 40% of BNY’s code was authored by AI, according to the bank.
Last year, BNY launched Eliza 2.0, an updated AI platform that’s used by nearly all BNY employees on a daily basis. It entered into a multiyear collaboration with OpenAI, and it created “digital employees” who work with human employees on tasks such as payment validations.
As of March 31, BNY had about 140 “digital employees” and about 220 enterprise AI solutions in development, it said. Approximately 50% of its human employees use AI every day, it added.
The bank has about 47,000 total employees, Vince said last month on the earnings call. He said improved financial outcomes from the use of AI include higher revenue per employee.
“This has been clear to us for several years that the technology was going to move incredibly rapidly, and it was going to scale in an exponential way, and we’re seeing that now in reality,” Vince said on the company’s earnings call last month. “I think as a user of AI, it’s incredibly important that we find ways to be able to embed it and have our people pulling it in, as opposed to potentially pushing it away.”
Trump accounts
Vince’s latest AI comments came during a panel discussion focused on global capital markets, kicking off the Milken Institute’s annual conference in Beverly Hills, California.
The panelists covered a range of topics including macroeconomic trends, the Iran war, private capital and affordability.
Vince also weighed in on the U.S. Treasury’s recent selection of BNY to be the financial agent for the Trump accounts program, a savings initiative offering $1,000 to each American child with a valid Social Security number who’s born between 2025 and 2028.
The money will grow tax-free until withdrawn.
Vince said the accounts are a way to “let more people in the United States have a path to wealth benefit” from compounding interest rates. The program could result in “$100,000, $200,000, $500,000 nest eggs over a period of time,” he said, describing those estimates as “very realistic if you assume the prior performance in equity markets could continue into the future.”
