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To give you a sense of the size and scale of Lori Beer's responsibilities, here's a term you may not have heard before: "exabyte."
That's how much data Beer's team of more than 63,000 technologists oversees at
In more practical terms, that means stewarding the data of 86.6 million U.S. customers, and the $12 trillion in digital payments being processed daily. Making sure it all works seamlessly, with proper controls, risk management and cybersecurity, falls on Beer, the firm's CIO.
Having come up at the firm since 2014, she doesn't seem intimidated by that heavy responsibility. "Everybody always asks me what keeps me up at night, but I sleep pretty well," she laughs. "I love the challenge of transforming us into an AI-native bank, during a period that is one of the most exciting times of technological innovation ever seen."
It's a long way from her bucolic upbringing on a farm in Western New York, where Beer's family raised cows and goats, canned their own vegetables to eat year-round, and picked apples from their own orchard.
But that kind of "grounding"—also provided by her three children and five grandkids—is useful in a rarefied world where global money flows are depending on her team to get it right.
And those early lessons of sowing and reaping surely aren't lost on her: It was
New capabilities being deployed at massive scale is where the rubber meets the road for Beer. "With innovation people often focus only on 'shiny objects,' but I'm interested in truly driving business impact," she says. "Our budget in tech was less than half when I started, and now it's $20 billion. The investments we're making in tech are creating real value for the firm."
Just one example: The firm's own LLM Suite, a bespoke large language model for its 250,000 employees, which received 2025's Innovation of the Year grand prize from American Banker.
Here's another development she is wrestling with: The rise of agentic commerce, which brings a host of fresh challenges with it, both practical and philosophical. Since the entire operation—and trillions of dollars—is predicated on customers being who they say they are, how do you ensure data protection and combat fraud while maximizing the potential of new tools?
"Think about these autonomous agents that everybody is so excited about," she says. "What risks do you have to plan for, how do you give identity to those agents, and manage what they have access to? It's a new paradigm that we're in—and you always have to be thinking two or three steps ahead."
In that way, innovation is much like a high-stakes chess match, where every move must be extremely thoughtful, advancing the game while not leaving your position exposed. On the one hand, you're protecting the legacy of an institution that's been around since 1799; on the other, you're pushing it into new spaces as the world's "most systemically important bank".
"The role of the CIO has shifted significantly over the last several years: Tech used to be more of a back-office function, and now it's front-and-center," she says. "You have to find new ways to interact with customers and clients, and develop new revenue opportunities, while at the same time running an operation of incredible scale and ensuring that $12 trillion in transactions is moving every day. It's a delicate balance."
