The story of Erica, Bank of America’s homegrown digital assistant

Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

Banking digital assistants may be common now, but in 2017, Bank of America was one of the first to be thinking about how they make the firm’s customer experience more powerful. The answer was an in-house build of a digital assistant that required the firm to hire PhDs in linguistics and build a collaboration structure that could facilitate teams from different departments. In 2024, BofA clients interacted with Erica 676 million times bringing its total interactions since its launch in 2018 to 2.5 billion. On the show today, Hari Gopalkrishnan, who leads Bank of America’s Consumer, Business & Wealth Management Technology team, joins us to tell the tale of how the firm built its industry-leading digital assistant, Erica. Hari shares how the firm has gradually expanded Erica’s remit beyond consumer banking to also include multiple lines of business and individual and corporate clients across the firm’s global footprint. It's a dive into what it takes to push the boundaries in this industry, how the firm thought about development, testing, expansion, and how Erica’s capabilities can be expanded with the recent innovations of Gen AI.