AI-Powered “Digital Workers” Deployed At Major Bank To Work Alongside Humans
“This is the next level.” Not surprisingly, banking was the early and most aggressive adopter of AI. AI assistants are increasingly treated as fellow employees who have identities tied to email addresses and phone numbers. Banker dials phone: “Sally, I am helping Mr. Smith in my office with some adjustments to his trust document. Please review it for us and ensure it is in line with the latest changes in the law; cc both of us by email when you are done.” Sally: “Will do. I will get back to you in 30 minutes.” There are endless examples. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
If you’re working in banking, your next colleague could be a bot. Once unthinkable, the Bank of New York Mellon announced that it has deployed dozens of artificial intelligence-powered “digital employees” that operate with human employees, and even have their own company login credentials.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said.
What the bank, also known as BNY, calls “digital workers,” other banks may refer to as “AI agents.” And while the industry lacks a clear consensus on exact terminology, it’s clear that the technology has a growing presence in financial services.
“This is the next level,” Russell told the Journal. “I’m sure in six months’ time it will become very, very prevalent.”
BNY said its AI Hub developed two digital employee personas in three months, according to Adrienne Russell. One persona is engineered to identify and resolve coding vulnerabilities, while the other verifies payment instructions. Each persona can operate in multiple instances—up to several dozen—with each instance confined to a specific team to limit company wide data access.
Soon, the bank plans to integrate its digital workforce with email addresses and Microsoft Teams access in the near future, enabling these AI personas to proactively communicate with human managers, but will maintain its focus on recruiting top human talent while simultaneously expanding its digital workforce, according to the Journal.
Of course, BNY isn’t the only bank looking to shift work from its human staff to AI. Goldman Sachs has already launched an internal AI assistant to 10,000 of its bankers, traders and asset managers to use. In an interview with CNBC, the bank’s Chief Information Officer, Marco Argenti, said the AI assistant will pitch in with basic tasks like proofreading documents and improving language. “Think about all the tasks that you might want to complete with regards to a variety of use cases for all those professions that can be now at your fingertips,” Argenti said. “The AI assistant becomes really like talking to another GS employee.”
“As we progress, the second step is when you’re starting to have this agentic behavior, that is, ‘I’m completing a task on behalf of a Goldman employee, and I need to take a set of steps,’” he added. “That’s where the model is going to start to do things like a Goldman employee, not only say things like a Goldman employee.”
At JPMorgan Chase, Chief Analytics Officer Derek Waldron thinks of “digital employees” as more of a helpful model for business people to conceptualize AI tools. They are fundamentally different from human employees, of course, but also traditional software systems, and so they may need their own type of system connectivity and access management, he said. It’s an open question exactly how much or how little access to give an agent, and it’s going to have to be figured out on a case-by-case basis, he said.
And while it’s not clear yet exactly what it will look like, he does envision a future where every employee will have an AI assistant and every client experience will have an AI concierge. 230,000 employees already have access to a general AI chatbot through the company’s proprietary platform, and the goal is to build out more autonomous and more agentic versions of it that are further and further tailored to individual job groups. -WSJ
According to Scott Mullins, Managing Director of AWS for Financial Servies, the question of how to integrate digital workers with a human workforce is a top issue across the finance industry.
“How do we coordinate that work together?” he said, adding “How do we manage those folks? How do we actually instruct those folks? What’s the new operating model? Those are the answers that we’re all working on right now.”
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Beautiful souls, we stand at the precipice of the most dangerous transformation in American governance since the founding of our republic. While you’ve been distracted by the theater of partisan politics, a far more sinister revolution has been quietly orchestrating itself in the shadows of Silicon Valley boardrooms and federal bureaucracies.
On July 4, 2025——the Trump administration will launch AI.gov, a centralized artificial intelligence command center that represents nothing less than the digitization of tyranny. This isn’t hyperbole or conspiracy theory. This is documented fact, leaked from government repositories and confirmed by multiple sources. What you’re about to learn will fundamentally change how you understand the battle for human agency in the 21st century.
The veil of secrecy surrounding AI.gov was torn away when researchers at 404 Media discovered a publicly accessible GitHub repository containing the project’s complete blueprint. Before government officials could slam the digital door shut, the entire architecture of America’s technocratic future had been exposed to public scrutiny.
AI.gov isn’t simply another government website—it’s a unified platform designed to give federal agencies unprecedented power to monitor, analyze, and control every aspect of digital life within government operations, with the infrastructure already in place to extend far beyond. The platform consists of three primary components that together form what I call the “Trinity of Technocratic Control”:
1. The AI Chatbot Assistant
Positioned as a helpful tool for “streamlining research, problem-solving, and strategy guidance,” this chatbot is designed to replace human judgment with algorithmic determination. By removing the “messy unpredictability” of human decision-making, it creates a veneer of efficiency while eroding the democratic process.
2. The Unified API Framework
This system promises to connect all government systems to AI models from major providers including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta. The centralization creates a single point of control over how artificial intelligence interfaces with every branch of federal government—from defense to healthcare to law enforcement.
3. CONSOLE: The Panopticon Dashboard
The most chilling component, CONSOLE, provides real-time monitoring of AI usage across government agencies. It tracks which tools federal employees use, analyzes their performance, and enables managers to “optimize resource allocation.” In plain English: comprehensive workplace surveillance disguised as management analytics.