# 12 Bank of America's CTO champions a disciplined approach to AI

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Hari Gopalkrishnan, who joined Bank of America's executive management team as chief technology and information officer in July 2025, runs all of the bank's technology with a singular focus: Scaling AI's power while maintaining human-like interactions.

Gopalkrishnan, who has been at Bank of America for 14 years, currently oversees tech for eight lines of business from consumer banking to wealth management. He manages a $14 billion annual budget and 60,000 employees who handle everything from software development to infrastructure.

His mandate has evolved from building digital foundations to embedding AI across client experiences and developer workflows, ensuring tools like Erica, Bank of America's flagship AI-driven virtual assistant, and GitHub Copilot deliver results without risks like hallucinations.

In early 2017, Gopalkrishnan assembled a technology team to develop Erica, which was launched with a simple goal to make client navigation within the mobile app easier.

"I remember being at a whiteboard having drawn it," Gopalkrishnan recalled. "It was a small group of us that got in a room, figured this out and did an innovation session to prototype it."

Their first task, years before AI became mainstream, was to figure out how to use natural language processing for clients to be able to interact with the bank.

Over time, Erica became what Bank of America calls a "cornerstone of Bank of America's digital transformation." The AI assistant has generated 3 billion interactions, has served 50 million users and has delivered 1.7 billion proactive insights.

More recently, Gopalkrishnan's team rolled out GitHub Copilot across their global developer ecosystem, growing adoption from 500 to 18,500 developers in under a year and boosting productivity by 20% through AI-assisted coding, according to Bank of America.

Among other key accomplishments in 2025, Gopalkrishnan's team implemented more than 50 AI-enabled fraud detection models that cut losses in half. In total, generative AI tools now support 800 traders with real-time insights and enable 18,000 developers with research support.

His team also co-developed CashPro Forecasting, its digital platform for corporate and commercial clients, which was adopted by over 3,000 companies across various sectors and saved a total of 250,000 hours by "compressing forecasting cycles from days to minutes," according to Bank of America.

"We have zero tolerance for things like hallucinations, bias," Gopalkrishnan said, noting that Erica's success stems from "thoughtful UX and foundational design."

"If you don't get the UX right, it's over," he noted.

Bank of America has more than 8,100 patents, and Gopalkrishnan is an inventor on 10 granted patents and has 1 pending patent application.

AI's evolution, in Gopalkrishnan's view, lies in handling life's messier moments and offering more nuanced, personalized experiences to clients.

He offered this example: "Hey, my parents passed away, and I'm concerned that, as they lived in Delaware and I live in New York – what forms do I need and what do I do?"

As AI evolves, Gopalkrishnan foresees client interactions will be more dialogue-driven, requiring empathy, but still looping in humans at key points.

"That's the next stage of the journey," he said.