# Another Hamilton is bringing BNY into the AI future > Source: > Published: 2026-09-16 19:13:01+00:00 # Another Hamilton is bringing BNY into the AI future Robin Vince, CEO and chairman of BNY, was the guest at the Presidential Leadership Series hosted by Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun. BNY was founded 240 years ago by Alexander Hamilton. But in a conversation with Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun about artificial intelligence and finance on Tuesday, BNY CEO and Chairman Robin Vince said he is looking to another Hamilton to propel the financial services company forward today. “You explained to me how you introduced AI and the transformational role of AI,” Aoun said. “Who is this Eliza?” Vince, also a proud parent of a Husky, smiled and introduced BNY’s AI platform Eliza, named after Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. “I can talk to Eliza. I can ask Eliza questions when I’ve got our client meetings and it will dig into all of the customer-relationship management. It’ll interrogate all the knowledge we have. I can then debrief with Eliza,” Vince told Aoun during a Presidential Leadership Series discussion at the EXP complex on Northeastern’s Boston campus. The series showcases fireside chats and discussions hosted by Aoun and brings in leaders who are helping to shape the future to campus. Past guests have included trailblazers from eBay, LinkedIn, and Li & Fung shipping company. Vince joined BNY in 2020 and has led the bank since 2022. He previously held many leadership roles during a 26-year career at Goldman Sachs. He also now serves on the boards of the [OpenAI Foundation](https://openaifoundation.org/) and OpenAI Group PBC, a [nonprofit and its for-profit subsidiary](https://openai.com/our-structure/), respectively, that are guided by the mission to ensure that AI benefits all humanity.  Vince told Aoun that when he started at BNY, the company had been “very stable and quite boring,” in its financial performance and had “lost a step on innovation.” As CEO, Vince said he was committed to “unlock more of [the company’s] potential.” He saw AI – which he noted he was first exposed to through a YouTube video – as a way to do so. “I came to a very very simple thought process: Is AI going to be dramatic and very important and consequential? I was pretty sure it was,” Vince said. Eliza was one result, and Vince said the platform has progressed to the point where it is starting to learn about BNY and understand certain aspects of the company “probably better than any human being could.” The platform can be accessed by a phone app, and it includes custom-built AI agents to help employees learn about client relationships, answer questions about meetings, provide tips on how to prioritize based on email messages and schedules, and accomplish other tasks. But AI has raised questions and concerns, most recently with tech leaders, among them OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who argue that development in the field [needs to slow down](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-11/openai-is-open-to-slowing-cutting-edge-ai-ceo-sam-altman-tells-staff) and become more regulated following AI models [going rogue](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/artificial-intelligence-agents-going-rogue-fuel-calls-for-regulation). “How are you thinking about it?” Aoun asked. Vince said the AI industry “has done a very poor job” advocating for benefits of the technology and how safety needs to be addressed. He also criticized the federal government’s reticence on partnerships with AI companies. But the CEO described the idea of a slowdown as not an end to AI innovation, but as a way to allow different aspects of AI development and training to “catch up” with each other and move in tandem. He explained that the development of AI models and their capabilities has progressed faster than “alignment training,” or making sure the models behave in a way that is consistent with human values. Model training has also progressed much, much faster than “chain-of-thought monitoring,” or the ability to keep an eye on what AI is thinking, saying and doing,” Vince said. “What we don’t want is models being great, unaligned with our values, and not telling us what they’re doing,” he said. “We’ll be happiest if the model capability, alignment capability, and chain of thought monitoring is essentially all roughly operating in lockstep.” But despite other challenges posed by AI such as the concern in some quarters of AI replacing workers -Vince said re-training would be a “societal challenge” – the CEO expressed optimism about the technology. “There’s a lot of scaremongering, and there are scary things associated with AI,” Vince said. But “AI can do great things as well,” he added. He cited the potential for the technology to be used to solve complex problems, for example, an OpenAI model [solved a major mathematical problem](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-million-dollar-math-problem-could-ai-solve-next/) on Sept. 8 that had been baffling mathematicians for decades; to discover new medicines; and to reduce chores for people at work and in life.  “It’s never actually been true that a new technology has reduced opportunity collectively and has reduced the growth of an economy,” Vince said. “Could it be true this time? Maybe. But I’m going to go on the side of history with this and think about the fact that AI will create more opportunity and more fairness.”