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When Steve Hagerman, chief information officer at
"Over my first year here, I spent a lot of time stabilizing risk management, risk governance, risk systems," said Hagerman. "Now, with that largely normalized and stabilized, we're on our front foot as we exit 2025 and move into this year."
In 2025, the bank deployed over 50 AI use cases across fraud prevention, digital engagement, call centers, wholesale banking and internal operations. This effort accelerated a multiyear transformation that was already underway following the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust, which created the $442 billion bank.
In addition to integrating technology, data and operations, Hagerman says he sought to reshape culture across an organization of more than 10,000 full‑time employees.
Every Friday, Hagerman writes a newsletter for the bank's employees.
"The intent is to demystify what it means to be a C‑suite executive at a large company," he said. "So I just describe in plain language what my week was like."
He is also pushing
Hagerman, who holds two patents, envisions an emerging, futuristic agentic workforce.
"I can hire a set of agents, I can train them. An agent can go on a corrective action plan. And the way they get off of that corrective action plan is I bring them more data, just like I would a human," he said. "They can be promoted. They can gain additional authority, agency and autonomy based on their success rate."
"They will be hired into my organization formally within the calendar year of 2026," he said. "If it [the agent] goes outside of its boundaries, it is placed on a corrective action plan, mirroring how human performance issues are handled. And then ultimately, when that product is no longer necessary, I can retire the agent. And who knows, maybe we're having retirement parties for agents this time next year."
Internally, Hagerman also serves as an AI adoption advocate. For fellow executives, Hagerman says that hands-on training, not slide decks, is what changes behavior.
"I have attempted multiple times to train my CEO, my operating council, the top 1,200 leaders of the company and my board on AI and just nothing sticks," he recalled. After thinking about it over the holidays, he realized the missing link: They weren't engaging enough with the tools themselves.
So he started designing weekly AI "scenarios" for his peers, complete with prompts.
"Then we come together in our CEO huddle weekly and we just talk about it. What did we learn? How did Perplexity, Grok, Claude or ChatGPT respond differently? What might be behind that?" Hagerman said, noting he's now designing a similar educational initiative for the board around ethics and governance of AI.
"2025 was a learning year for me about how not to train on AI, and I think we've got a nice trajectory going into this year."
