Bank of America bolsters its artificial intelligence toolkit

• Key insight: Bank of America has added gen AI to help business banking staff.  
• What's at stake: Improvements in time and personalized service.
• Forward look: Citigroup and Temenos both added AI tools this week. 
  

The artificial intelligence race among banks picked up speed early this week with several moves, including a new platform from Bank of America. 
Bank of America on Tuesday launched "AskGlobal Payments Solutions (or AskGPS)," a generative AI program designed for the bank's transaction banking unit that serves more than 40,000 business clients. "Our approach is, 'how do we answer these questions that would otherwise require deep internal research or a phone call with a product expert?'" Jarrett Bruhn, managing director and global head of data and artificial intelligence for GPS at Bank of America, told American Banker. 

The stakes are high for banks in embracing new forms of artificial intelligence, with most of the industry dedicating parts of their budgets to the technology. Eighty percent of U.S. banks have increased their AI spending in 2025, according to American Banker's Cost of AI study, noting that 11% of bankers said they expect to make a significant increase (25% or more); 25% plan a moderate increase (10% to 24%); 44% project a slight increase (less than 10%); 7% expect no change and 13% plan to decrease AI spending.

BofA's update

AskGPS, which was built internally at BofA, uses gen AI to pour over more than 3,200 internal documents and presentations, including product guides, term sheets and FAQs. The bank's staff input client questions and receive answers within a few seconds, based on gen AI and this trove of documents. 

Before gen AI, the prevailing technology used to manage client queries located the proper BofA internal documents, but it didn't necessarily produce answers, according to Bruhn, adding the bank has thousands of documents in its library. Gen AI can use these documents to help produce analyses for clients. 

"When we saw [gen AI] come out, we realized it's not just about adding speed to get an answer," Bruhn said, adding the goal is to improve the quality of its advisory services. . 

BofA's AskGPS replaces a process that had employees making phone calls to product specialists in different locations and different time zones.

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The bank envisions that AskGPS can improve turnaround for product and onboarding queries, providing more tailored solutions, and is grounded in thousands of vetted internal resources; and enhanced strategic guidance. 

"An industrial company can ask about working capital, and 'AskGPS' will frame that as a strategy to improve cashflow," Bruhn said. "Instead of a person spending time building an email response to that question, you get a fast answer on which strategy matters and why." 

 Bank of America divides its AI strategy across four domains: AI agents, web search and  summarization, content generation, and operations and coding. Other recent deployments include CashPro Chat, a virtual assistant designed for external use–65% of the bank's clients have deployed the technology; CashProForcasting, which uses predictive analysis to forecast cash positions; and Intelligence Receivables, which uses AI and data capture to assemble payment information and remittance details. 

In a research note on Bank of America, Allen Tischler, senior vice president of Moody's Ratings, said Bank of America's "business diversification is evident" and is offsetting lower investment banking fees. But Tischler also noted AI investments are boosting the bank's cost/income ratio, which at the end of June was 65%, up from 64% the prior year. 

In another research note, Truist Financial analyst John McDonald, who covers Bank of America, said the bank's financial performance has been strong, but he added some artificial intelligence stocks have higher growth potential with lower risks, suggesting benefits to investing in adding new AI technology. 

Busy week for AI

BofA released its AI update as Citigroup expanded internal AI usage by requiring more than 175,000 employees to complete training on writing gen AI prompts. And bank technology firm Temenos launched an AI-powered platform for treasury management, combining payments, accounts, risk and treasury modules. At Citigroup, the training program is predicated on the belief that better prompts result in better performance of the technology. 

At Temenos, which has about 1,700 bank clients, the new platform will include AI-supported payment processing, fraud detection, and copilots will be sold as a way to minimize manual intervention and improve straight-through processing. Temenos will combine the new AI platform with its recently launched FCM AI Agent, a strategy to expand agentic AI use among banks.

"With the rapid rise of instant payments and the growing influence of AI in financial services, institutions are actively seeking solutions that are both unified and intelligent to manage increasing complexity, compliance demands, and customer expectations," Barb Morgan, chief product and technology officer at Temenos, said in a release. Business comfort with AI is increasing, potentially creating a market for bank-led deployments.

Fifty- eight percent of businesses now use generative and agentic AI for forecasting, workflow automation and supplier onboarding, a move that has tripled cash flow visibility since 2023 and delivered 66% greater savings, according to Visa research on AI that was released on Monday. Visa surveyed 1,457 CFOs and Treasurers across 23 countries and 10 industry segments at firms with annual revenues between $50 million and $1 billion.