At the oldest bank in the United States, 134 new employees are not sleeping or taking sick leave. They don’t even have names.
These are what BNY calls “digital employees”. They work alongside humans. They have unique roles and are evaluated based on how well they perform them. Some of their work was done by people last year.
“The digital employee works 24/7, which is obviously very different from our human counterparts,” said Rachel Lewis, who oversees nine digital employees in addition to thousands of humans as head of payments operations for BNY. “It’s really focused on very specific, repetitive tasks that allow our human employees to perform much more human, intense and interesting roles.”
BNY employs 48,100 people, up from about 53,400 in 2023, according to a report. presentation of recent results. Last month, during the company’s fourth-quarter analyst call, CFO Dermot McDonogh was asked what the 134 digital employees meant for the company’s cost savings.
“Our workforce has declined slightly, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with AI yet,” McDonogh said. “We say that internally, AI unlocks capabilities. We don’t think of it in the narrow definition of efficiency. It’s all about growing with customers, increasing revenue and optimizing the potential of our people.”
Across Wall Street, analysts and investors are starting to ask more questions about how the industry’s spending on AI will translate into efficiency and higher returns. BNY spent $3.8 billion on technology in 2025, or about 19% of its revenue. This is the highest proportion among its big bank peers, according to data compiled by CNBC.
JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, BNY
“There is an arms race in AI. Banks are part of it,” said Mike Mayo, an analyst at Wells Fargo. “But you don’t define success by who spends the most. You define success by who gets the best results. »
“It takes a lot of ‘spray and pray’ when it comes to technology spending in general,” he said.
However, BNY has been identified as one of the companies that could reap the greatest benefits from AI. The Goldman Sachs research team examined the Russell 1000 for potential productivity improvements, based on labor costs and salary exposure to AI automation. The company ranked BNY at the top of this list, saying the bank could see its earnings per share increase by 19%.
But in several conversations CNBC had with BNY executives, they asserted that the slew of technology investments would not come at the expense of human employees.
“I wouldn’t think of it that way,” said Michelle O’Reilly, global head of talent at BNY. “I think it’s more about unlocking that productivity, allowing all employees to be productive.”
As the company trains more digital employees, it also upskills its employees. Shortly after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, BNY set up its AI Hub.
“That’s when we really doubled down and realized this was going to transform the bank,” said Leigh-Ann Russell, BNY’s chief information officer and global head of engineering. “Initially, our main goal was enablement: providing training to each of our bank employees.”
BNY has built a platform called Eliza, which brings together a variety of commercially available open source models that are integrated with the company’s internal data and compliance. Nearly every BNY employee has completed a 10-hour Eliza training course, and thousands more have gone further through a multi-day AI bootcamp that can help non-engineers find creative ways to automate parts of their work.
The name “Eliza” is a tribute to Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, wife of the bank’s founder and first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.
“The democratization of this technology is one of our strengths in how we think we’ve succeeded so far,” Russell said. “I have this juxtaposition of the original history of this incredible 241-year-old institution and being on the cutting edge of AI, and I think it’s just a nice reminder of technology over the centuries.”