How Bank of America cracked the code on AI adoption by making Erica indispensable to both customers and employees
- Bank of America transformed its customer chatbot Erica into an employee productivity powerhouse, achieving 50% IT service desk automation by strategically targeting common pain points and building adoption incrementally over five years.
- Learn the adoption secrets behind getting 90% of employees to embrace AI tools, including how Bank of America overcame the adoption hump and integrated generative AI with 25 proof-of-concept projects now entering production.
Historically, most banks have seen digital assistants as little more than peripheral features of their digital footprint. Bank of America took a very different approach with its virtual assistant Erica, from the get go, allowing the chatbot to wrap around the firm’s consumer experience and enhance it at the same time.
And the firm continues to invest in Erica in two critical ways: First, the bank is identifying and integrating technologies that can improve the Erica experience for consumers like Gen AI. Secondly, as the digital assistant evolves, Bank of America is also opening up the Erica tech for internal use cases.
Recently, Hari Gopalkrishnan, CIO, Head of Consumer, Business Banking and Wealth Management Technology, at the firm joined me on the Tearsheet podcast to share how the firm’s digital assistant, Erica, has evolved over the years and is ripe for integrating Gen AI to build enhanced capabilities.
“As we look at the emergence of Generative AI, we actually see that classification can actually get a lot better. You can actually talk even more naturally in a natural language. So that is just a natural sort of expansion of where we go with Erica. We have about 25 different proof of concepts right now, many of them are actually about to get into production, which use a Large Language Model in some way, to continue to enhance the work that we’ve been doing,” he said.
Erica’s success with consumers fueled the firm’s efforts to open up the digital assistant for employees. When it launched in 2020, the virtual assistant allowed employees to complete basic tasks like password resets, and device activation. In 2023, Erica for Employees saw another boost in capability with employees being able to review health benefits, locate payroll and tax forms, through the digital assistant.
In this article we breakdown how Bank of America repurposed Erica’s capabilities for internal use cases, and what role new technologies like Gen AI have to play in the firm’s internal strategies and tools.
How Bank of America got Erica for Employees over the adoption hump
