AI is the car, and you are the driver: Bank of America’s approach to AI learning
- Bank of America trains its 200,000+ teammates on Gen AI by teaching accountability and critical thinking first, deliberately leaving out tokens and technical details.
- Role-specific learning pathways, AI conversation simulators, and a network of AI Champions give employees a safe place to build skills and ease concerns about their careers. Success is measured by whether learning changes how people work and shows up in business outcomes.
Most academic curricula do not yet include formal Gen AI instruction, so for many new hires, the first structured lesson in working with Gen AI happens on the job. At Bank of America, which has more than 200,000 teammates, the design of that lesson carries real weight. This responsibility is overseen by The Academy, the bank’s award-winning onboarding, education, and professional development organization.
Michael Wynn, Academy Enterprise Learning and AI Strategy Executive, leads this work. He anchors it in a single metaphor: “AI is the car, and you are the driver.”
For Wynn, Gen AI training begins in the analog. New teammates receive a pen and write down the outcome they want, the context that matters, and how they will know whether an answer is good. Wynn calls it a reflection technique that shows “the value of slowing down to think before you prompt,” and it builds the critical thinking and problem definition that make later prompting sharper.
Judgment stays with the person
At The Academy, strategic prompt design workshops and responsible use of AI training come first. The opening prompting course introduces a “human in the lead” concept, so teammates understand from day one that they remain accountable for reviewing, editing, and approving anything AI produces. …
