Bank of America Chief Information and Technology Officer (CTIO) Hari Gopalkrishnan has played a key role in the bank’s AI rollout since it first announced its Erica chatbot back in 2016, but, speaking to The Stack, he strikes a cautious tone when discussing the returns on AI investment.
“People are going a little crazy about, like, ‘We can use agents, and agents will call agents, and they will use tokens,’” he says during a conversation at the bank’s London office, “Before you know it, something that was a $100,000 process, you spend $1 million trying to optimize it.”
That’s not to say America’s second-largest bank, which manages some $4.9 trillion in client funds, isn’t investing heavily in AI.
After chatting with The Stack, the CTIO team sent over AI statistics outlining its 300 use cases in development, 34 of which are “fully deployed,” and 1,722 AI-focused patents registered in its name.
But Gopalkrishnan says it's easy to fall into a trap with AI, explaining, “With old technologies, you spent so much time writing code, you had plenty of time to figure out how much it was going to cost you. Because [AI] is so fast to deploy, it's very easy to get seduced into thinking ‘Let's just go full steam ahead and figure out the cost later.’”
“That doesn’t work well,” he adds.
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