- Key insight: AI deployments need to be done with empathy, not with staff reductions, according to Kristin Milchanowski, chief AI and data officer at BMO.
- Relevant stats: Companies cited artificial intelligence for 54,836 planned layoffs in 2025.
- Forward look: Milchanowski says BMO will be able to grow while keeping headcount level, using AI.
Several tech companies, including Block, have announced AI-related layoffs recently. Kristin Milchanowski is not a fan.
"With some of the layoffs that we're seeing, I think it's quite frankly lazy," she said during a
Milchanowski, who is chief AI and data officer at BMO, believes AI will be a net creator of jobs. "Are they going to change? Absolutely," she said. "My job is already changing. How we show up as a developer, how we show up as an engineer is changing. It's got a whole lot easier with Claude."
The bank is still hiring and creating new positions and roles, she said. "There's a lot of upskilling and training involved in what we do, but one of our hopes is that we do keep our employment rather stable over time and not see it grow as much, but yet our revenues grow, so we're hoping we can build a bigger bank, with the same volume of people that we have."
For instance, BMO is currently hiring quantum developers.
"Our research is getting rather serious, and we believe that now is the time to transform with that technology and embed it into our infrastructure," she said. "We're still hiring the software engineers, we're still hiring developers, even though that's also where a lot of our capacity is being created with AI, but there's still so much to develop. We're still hiring bankers. We are in a relationship business, and we will always be a relationship-forward business. Trust is absolutely everything to our clients, and we want our bankers to be supported with the technology. We don't see them being replaced by AI."
Empathy in AI
Milchanowski related several AI leadership principles in her recently published book, "Return on Intelligence." In the book she wrote, "Innovation without empathy is merely efficiency without trust."
"The empathy part is really crucial to making sure that you understand what the end goal is of whatever it is you're designing," Michanowski said during the session. "Oftentimes we are asked to develop a home financing mortgage widget, and the concept of empathy is, how do we want this widget to feel when it gets to the end user's hands, how do we want it to look? How do we want it to be delivered? What kind of results do we want to see on the screen? Having that end state in mind is important to the conversation and to the design of what you're building."
Customers and employees need to see themselves in the product that a bank is building for them, she said.
At BMO, empathy is drawn from listening, Milchanowski said. Sometimes engineers go for a "ride along," watching customers do the task for which they're developing an agent.
KPIs v. toys
Milchanowski also pointed out in her book that when innovation agents are introduced as innovation, they're considered toys, but when they have business metrics attached to them, people take them more seriously.
To arrive at performance indicators, the bank looks at data such as number of hits, length of time clients stay on the bank's app, or number of new clients drawn by the new technology.
"At BMO, we're not to start an initiative without knowing that it's going to create one basis point of an improvement, whether by revenue or cost reduction," she said. Projects have to align to key performance indicators. "What you're trying to achieve is an actual return on that investment, and without having the measurement, then who knows where you're going to arrive at the end of the day."
