“How BNY’s new AI tool Eliza is minting an army of disposable assistants” is an exclusive Fortune report by my colleague Michael del Castillo. With $50 trillion worth of assets under custody or administration, BNY is one of the largest banks in the world to announce a proprietary AI. 

Del Castillo writes: “BNY’s new AI tool is named Eliza in honor of the wife of Alexander Hamilton, who founded the bank’s corporate predecessor. The physical part of Eliza’s brain consists of Nvidia microchips and cloud infrastructure powered by Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud. But Eliza’s mind, the way she approaches problems, is a BNY original, using OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.

“While most open-source AIs are essentially one-size-fits-all virtual assistants, Eliza lets employees create bespoke assistants (BNY prefers the term “agent”) and fill them with proprietary data in order to take on particular tasks.” Eliza is currently being used by a quarter of the bank’s employees, which is about 14,000 people.

You can read the full story about how Eliza came to life here. 

CEOs in the financial services sector are increasingly embracing generative AI, according to a study by IBM released in June. More than half (57%) of banking and financial markets (BFM) CEOs surveyed said that gaining a competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI.

IBM’s findings are part of an annual global cross-industry study that surveyed more than 3,000 CEOs from over 30 countries and 26 industries. The respondents included 297 CEOs from the BFM sector.

But with the implementation of a technological transformation, there’s a culture change. For that reason, 65% said success with AI will depend more on people’s adoption than the technology itself. Nonetheless, 60% said they are pushing for AI adoption more quickly than some employees might want, according to the study.

Another finding is 53% said they’re struggling to find the talent to fill key technology roles. And due to generative AI, half of the CEOs said they are hiring for roles that did not even exist this time last year. Another aspect of using generative AI is maintaining customer trust—something that will have a greater impact on success than any specific product or service, according to the CEOs.

“Workforce needs are shifting rapidly in the financial services sector and CEOs must ensure that upskilling programs are prioritized,” Shanker Ramamurthy, a global managing partner at IBM Consulting said in a statement.

That’s certainly something to consider as the financial services sector plans to go all in on generative AI. 

LeackStat 2024