TLDR: BNY Mellon has announced a significant update to its enterprise AI platform, Eliza, alongside a remarkable achievement in employee AI literacy, with 98% of its workforce now trained in artificial intelligence. The financial institution continues to expand its AI capabilities, deploying advanced solutions and fostering a culture of innovation and responsible AI use.
BNY Mellon, a leading financial institution, has unveiled an updated version of its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, Eliza, marking a significant stride in its digital transformation journey. The announcement is accompanied by the impressive statistic that 98% of its employees have undergone training in artificial intelligence, underscoring the bank’s commitment to integrating AI across its operations and empowering its workforce.
Eliza, named after Eliza Hamilton, wife of BNY Mellon’s founder Alexander Hamilton, serves as a central enterprise AI platform. It is designed to enhance client service, streamline company operations, and drive cultural transformation through a marketplace of AI solutions, access to approved datasets, and a community for sharing insights into intelligent tools and platforms. The platform’s evolution is geared towards more sophisticated reasoning capabilities, with Eliza 2.0, expected to launch in 2025, offering more detailed responses based on complex, human-like thought processes. Sarthak Pattanaik, head of BNY’s AI hub, emphasized that Eliza 2.0 is “a lot more about reasoning: Instead of just giving an answer, it’s about taking a step back, thinking through various options.”
BNY Mellon has been at the forefront of AI adoption in financial services for over five years. The bank was the first major financial institution to deploy an AI Supercomputer, powered by NVIDIA, to accelerate processing capacity and launch AI-enabled capabilities. Currently, BNY Mellon boasts over 80 AI-enabled solutions in production, supporting a wide array of functions including predictive analytics, automation, and anomaly detection.
The bank’s commitment to AI extends to its workforce development. As of February 1, 2025, over 46,000 employees have been onboarded onto the Eliza platform, providing more than 90% of the workforce with the opportunity to responsibly leverage generative AI capabilities. This extensive training program includes 130 hours of AI learning content tailored for various roles, including executive leadership. Over 26,000 hours of AI training have been completed by more than 2,700 BNY Mellon employees. Furthermore, 1,100 employees participated in the firm’s 2024 Hackcelerator 2.0, generating over 120 AI-based ideas for the Wealth and Investment businesses.
Eliza’s infrastructure is robust, utilizing on-premise Nvidia GPUs and cloud infrastructure from major providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The platform integrates both commercial large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, and open-source LLMs, including Meta’s Llama. Use cases for Eliza are diverse, ranging from legal teams using it to compare documents and answer questions, to senior executives drafting talking points, and technical teams translating SQL snippets into natural language.
BNY Mellon places a strong emphasis on responsible and ethical AI use. Employees undergo mandatory training on appropriate data usage and the importance of “human-in-the-loop” oversight, requiring them to pass a test before gaining access to Eliza. The bank has implemented a comprehensive AI governance framework, involving multidisciplinary expertise from Legal, Privacy, Responsible AI, Data Governance, Information Security, Resiliency, Risk, and Compliance departments. This framework ensures compliant, responsible, and ethical development, deployment, and operation of AI systems, with safeguards around information security, third-party governance, vulnerability management, identity and access management, and data loss prevention.
Sharyn Jones, BNY’s global head of talent management, clarified that the objective of tools like Eliza is not job displacement but rather to enhance employee capabilities and optimize how they spend their time. CEO Robin Vince views the significant payoff from these AI investments as a “26 and beyond story,” indicating a long-term strategic vision for AI integration.
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In a move to further extend its AI leadership, BNY Mellon has also signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, and will launch free training for community bank executives in cybersecurity and AI in September 2025. These initiatives solidify BNY Mellon’s position at the forefront of AI innovation and adoption within the financial services sector.
