Business

Bank of America prioritizes bigger AI initiatives, as annual spending on new tech increased by 44% over the past decade

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1 day ago

November 5, 2025

Bank of America’s annual spending on new, strategic technology initiatives, which includes investments in artificial intelligence, has increased by 44% over the past decade to reach $4 billion in 2025. The executive that’s steering those investments is Hari Gopalkrishnan, a 14-year veteran who was promoted to serve as the chief technology and information officer in late July.

Today at Bank of America’s investor day event, Gopalkrishnan will outline the vision for these strategic tech bets and discuss how they tie into the broader $118 billion in tech investments that the company has made over the past decade. It is the first time leadership has held this event in 15 years and Gopalkrishnan, CEO Brian Moynihan, and other C-suite leaders will face investors as Bank of America’s stock has lagged the five other large U.S. banks for the past five years.

“We have steadily increased our spend in technology, now up to $13 billion a year, of which $4 billion goes into strategic growth,” Gopalkrishnan tells Fortune ahead of his one-hour investor day panel discussion with two other Bank of America technologists. “We leverage across the enterprise, so every dollar you spend gets the maximum bang for the buck, as opposed to sort of being siloed by line of business.”

That means that when Gopalkrishnan deploys new AI tools and functionality, he will prioritize applications that can scale across all eight lines of business, which includes global capital markets, consumer lending, and retail banking.

One example of this in action is Erica, an AI virtual assistant that’s surpassed three billion client interactions since the tool launched in 2018. It now averages more than 58 million interactions per month, facilitating chatbot conversations with clients, proactively altering them on changes to their past spending patterns or flagging when they may have been double-charged by a merchant, and answering banking questions. The tool is currently available on Bank of America’s mobile app, but will expand next year to the desktop.

In 2020, Bank of America launched Erica for Employees, an internal version of the tool that more than 90% of the company’s global workforce of 213,000 now uses regularly. Erica has helped reduce the number of calls into the company’s IT service desk by 50%.

The banking sector has embraced generative AI capabilities at a faster pace than most sectors, with investments focused on AI-enabled chatbots, virtual assistants that can summarize financial documents, fraud monitoring, and assisting employees as they navigate complex international regulatory changes. Generative, predictive, and other forms of AI collectively are projected to generate as much as $340 billion annually in value creation for the global banking sector, consulting giant McKinsey has estimated.

Financial giants, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, have also been steadily rolling out new generative AI tools to more employees throughout 2025.

At Bank of America, Gopalkrishnan says he’s less incentivized to focus his investments on AI tools that can save a couple minutes on simplistic workplace tasks. “When you look at the end-to-end client journey, they involve like 40-plus processes and thousands of employees,” says Gopalkrishnan. “You start to pick apart that process and reimagine it. That’s when you get ROI.”

Bank of America has explored more than 45 different “proof of concept” use cases for generative AI , with 15 of them commercially live today. Some of the priority use cases that Gopalkrishnan is deploying include tools that can summarize or offer search functionality for capital markets and investment banking employees, making it easier to pull real-time market commentary. An in-house built “AskGPS” tool, which was trained on over 3,200 internal documents and presentations, allows employees to ask complex questions on behalf of clients and receive responses within seconds.

Bank of America has also invested $1.5 billion into the company’s data capabilities over the past five years, which Gopalkrishnan says was critical to create a foundation that allowed for more AI adoption.

Within the technology department, Gopalkrishnan has deployed AI coding assistants that are used by 18,000 developers. There has already been a 20% productivity lift to select parts of the development life cycle that Bank of America has focused its efforts on.

Gopalkrishnan says he’s mostly leaning on one unnamed vendor to support AI-enabled code assistance, but is continuing to explore other tools on a smaller scale. His intent is to standardize the application of these AI coding tools over time to as few vendors as possible.

More than 130,000 Bank of America employees are currently authorized to use the enterprise productivity tools and by the end of the year, everyone will have access to them. Bank of America has sought to motivate its workforce by offering AI learning programs that begin by teaching the basics of AI, but also more advanced prompt engineering training.

“It’s really a combination of training, education, giving them exposure to the tools, and then ongoing commitment to reskill, as the work changes,” says Gopalkrishnan.

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Tech earnings highlight cracks in AI’s valuation halo. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon have all spent billions to support their AI initiatives—and all four told investors last week that they will increase spending even more in 2026. Investors have consistently supported the AI boom over the past few years, though that enthusiasm showed some notable cracks in the latest earnings season, as Microsoft and Meta Platforms both saw their stocks fall amid concerns for the lofty levels of spending needed to support their AI ambitions. What’s vexing investors is: AI is generating billions of dollars in revenue and bottom-line efficiencies, but exactly how much, at what pace, and at what price? That investment thesis still needs time to marinate as these tech giants have added debt to support their AI spending.

OpenAI strikes a big compute deal with Amazon; projects massive revenue growth. On Monday, OpenAI inked a deal to buy $38 billion worth of compute from Amazon and will immediately start to access Nvidia’s graphics processing units. The partnership is notable as it is one of OpenAI’s first big moves away from Microsoft, who the AI startup had an exclusive cloud agreement with up until this year. Separately, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated more bullish expectations for revenue growth, sharing that annual revenue is “well more” than reports of $13 billion a year. When asked by the Bg2 Pod about revenue estimates exceeding $100 billion a year by 2028 or 2029, Altman responded: “How about ‘27?”

Nvidia makes history as the first-ever company worth $5 trillion. Last week, AI chipmaker Nvidia officially became the world’s first company to achieve a market capitalization north of $5 trillion, pulling ahead of tech rivals like Microsoft and Apple, who are each worth close to $4 trillion. The latest stock market gains came after Nvidia’s GTC developer conference, where CEO Jensen Huang disclosed that the company had secured more than $500 billion in orders for its AI chips through the end of next year. Major new deals that have been unveiled the past several days have included partnerships with Eli Lilly, Uber Technologies, and Johnson & Johnson. Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is now larger than six of the 11 sectors in the S&P 500 index and the entire value of equity markets of most countries.

Hiring spree: AI companies are seeking more “forward-deployed engineers.” This year, job advertisements have been soaring for a new specialist software developer who can write code, but also is adept at talking to customers. By hiring more forward-deployed engineers, AI hyperscalers like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cohere would aim to make their AI models more specialized and useful for companies, thus generating bigger contracts and more revenue. The Financial Times reports that job advertisements for these roles have increased more than 800% between January and September of 2025, citing data from the jobs platform Indeed.

ADOPTION CURVE

Firms that prioritize AI governance are also generating stronger returns from their investments. A recent EY survey of 975 C-suite leaders across 21 countries found that while nearly every company had already suffered financial losses from AI-related incidents—with average damages “conservatively” exceeding $4.4 million—the enterprises that had stronger governance measures like real-time monitoring and oversight committees were seeing far fewer damages. And notably, those organizations are also seeing stronger returns from their AI investments: 34% more likely to see improvements in revenue growth and 65% more likely to produce cost savings.

“When I look at that data, what it tells me is that those companies are taking AI more seriously,” says Joe Depa, EY’s global chief innovation officer. “That means they’re likely training and talking about how to leverage AI, both ethically, but also from a productivity standpoint.”

The survey also found that members of the C-suite may still be struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of change as AI technologies advance. On average, when asked to identify the appropriate controls against five AI-related risks, including hallucinations and bias, only 12% of the C-suite respondents answered correctly. CTOs and CIOs did the best (26% and 24%, respectively), while chief operating officers (6%) and chief marketing officers (3%) were at the bottom of the list.

Courtesy of EY

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Boundless Network is seeking a CTO. Posted salary range: $336K-$402K/year.

– Minnetronix Medical is seeking a VP of IT, based in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. Posted salary range: $230K-$300K/year.

– The University of Massachusetts Boston is seeking a CIO, based in the greater Boston area. Posted salary range: $225K-$250K/year.

– Bush and Bush Law Group is seeking a CTO, based in Dallas. Posted salary range: $100K-$150K/year.

Hired:

– Valvoline announced the appointment of Hitesh Patel as chief technology and cybersecurity officer, effective immediately. Prior to joining the retail automotive services company, Patel served as SVP and CIO of bedding manufacturer Sleep Number. He also held technology leadership roles for retailers Advance Auto Parts and Best Buy.

– Ronald McDonald House appointed Jarrod Bell as CIO, joining the family focused nonprofit to advance a digital transformation and enhance cybersecurity. Bell previously served as a managing consultant at Yates and as CTO at the nonprofit Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. He also previously served as a CIO of the San Francisco Opera.

– Cabinetworks Group has promoted Erik Wille to serve as the cabinet manufacturer’s CTO, after assuming the role on an interim basis earlier this year. Wille initially joined Cabinetworks as SVP and CISO in 2023 and led various initiatives, including rebuilding the company’s information security management system and launching a new security awareness program. He previously held leadership roles at American Axle & Manufacturing and Penske Automotive Group.

– Teradata has promoted Josh Fecteau to serve as the software company’s chief data and AI officer. Fecteau first joined Teradata in 2019 as a senior director of strategy and solutions architecture. He also held leadership roles at data storage company EMC, which Dell acquired in 2016, and has advised CIOs as a consultant.

– Transflo named Jay Tomasello as CTO, joining the transportation-focused software provider after most recently serving as CIO at ground transportation services provider Forward Air. Prior to that, he spent more than nine years at shipping giant FedEx, where Tomasello served as CIO and VP of IT at FedEx Supply Chain.

– Binti announced that former co-founder, Gabe Kopley, will rejoin the software provider as CTO. Kopley joined the company in 2015 and became a co-founder of Binti with CEO Felicia Curcuru and was also part of the startup’s launch in 2017. In his time away from Binti, Kopley served as director of engineering at Salesforce.

– Blue Gold appointed Nathan Dionne as CTO to lead the company’s goal of launching a blockchain-based, gold-backed token. Previously, Dionne served as an early team member at gift cards provider CashStar, as CTO at digital media company Barstool Sports, and as founder of online sports betting platform PlayGreen.

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Gen Z’s brains are ‘growing around their phones’ the way a tree warps around a tombstone, ‘Anxious Generation’ author warns

Published

3 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Jace Porter

A global public health emergency driven by the swift transition from a play-based to a phone-based childhood has created a “global destruction of human flourishing” among young people, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern, speaking at a recent Dartmouth–United Nations Development Program symposium on youth well-being, argued that children born after 1995—Gen Z—are fundamentally different from earlier generations because they experienced puberty amid omnipresent smartphones and social media.

Haidt, who previously explicated many of his thoughts about Gen Z in the New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation, used a powerful metaphor to explain the neurological consequences of this change: tree roots. Saying they are great metaphors for neurons, Haidt explained that tree-root growth is structured by the environment where they are found. He referred to a picture of a tree growing around a Civil War–era tombstone, where the tombstone scratched the bark 100 years ago, and the tree adapted. The same is true for Gen Z, he argued: “Their brains have been growing around their phones very much in the way that this tree grew around this tombstone.”

Beyond mental health, Haidt said this has physical manifestations. Children are “growing hunched around their phone,” he said, with phone addiction literally “warping eyeballs,” leading to a global rise in myopia (shortsightedness). Screen time is also known to harm sleep, he added. He went on to describe the “great rewiring” of humanity, brought on by the smartphone.

A catastrophe of mental and physical health

This “great rewiring,” which Haidt places between 2010 and 2015, coincides with a synchronized global collapse in teen mental health. Haidt noted Gen Z is “suddenly much more mentally ill than the millennials,” primarily suffering from anxiety and depression.

The evidence of decline is seen in objective behavior, not just self-reporting. For instance, data tracking nonfatal self-harm among early teens (10- to 14-year-olds) shows the girls’ rate “more than quintuples” between 2010 and 2015. Around the world, wherever the internet is in kids’ pockets, Haidt argued, young people are becoming less happy and flourishing less.

The transition Haidt describes occurred in two acts. Act one involved the gradual decline of play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s. Act two was the arrival of a phone-based childhood, a sudden and universal shift that started in the early 2010s. Haidt summarized the tragic change by saying, “We have overprotected our children in the real world, and we have under-protected them online.”

The erosion of focus and meaning

The crisis extends into cognitive ability. Haidt points out, “Fifty years of progress ended in 2012” in educational achievement metrics, specifically the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, also called the “nation’s report card.” This decline suggests a “broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application,” leading to what Haidt calls a “complete disaster for humanity”: a loss of that capacity. “We’re getting dumber exactly as our machines are getting smarter and taking over more areas of life,” he said.

Students themselves acknowledge the cognitive shift, according to Haidt. He related an anecdote from one of his students, describing the difficulty of reading: “I open a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.” Furthermore, he said, high school seniors increasingly report “life often feels meaningless.” Haidt connected this directly to the time spent online, adding that he can’t fully disagree: “If you’re spending five hours a day on social media, you’re not doing anything. Your life actually is meaningless.”

The paths to this “pit of despair” differ by gender. For girls, social media remains the “clearest culprit,” altering development, social relationships, and moods. For boys, the danger centers on a dopamine addiction crisis, with companies competing to “hook them” via highly addictive video games and increasingly available high-definition porn.

Haidt’s comments came as part of a symposium organized by Dartmouth economics professor David Blanchflower, whose work has previously been covered in Fortune. Most recently, he and University College London’s Alex Bryson found the midlife crisis has become a thing of the past, with a quarter-life crisis very real in reams of economic data. Young workers really are full of rising despair, their research found. Blanchflower told Fortune in September he’s “freaked” out by what his research is showing: “Suddenly young workers look to be in big trouble … Now, both absolutely and relatively, the young are worse off.” The midlife hump in despair, commonly known as the midlife crisis, used to be one of social science’s most important patterns, he added, and that’s over now.

The symposium occurred just weeks after an authority no less than Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged Gen Z is having an especially hard time in the economy of 2025. “Kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs,” Powell said in mid-September, at a press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

The solution: Collective action

Haidt asserted the theory suggesting the rewiring of childhood is the only one that can account for the synchronized collapse in mental health globally. Given that this is a collective action problem, the solution must also be collective action, he argues.

Haidt proposed four key norms to reverse a phone-based childhood and restore the play-based model:

Delay smartphone use: Give children a flip phone or simple phone until high school or age 14 internationally.
Social media age limit: “No social media before 16,” Haidt stresses. “We are completely insane if we give puberty over to social [media].”
Phone-free schools: Implement “bell-to-bell” policies, which teachers have welcomed, and studies are already showing raised grades.
Promote independence and play: Encourage “far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.”

Haidt stressed that although there will be a “permanent echo of diminished potential” in the generation that has already passed through puberty with these devices, “it’s not too late for individuals if they make an effort and they make it collectively.”

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says Gen Z needs in-demand skills to succeed in 2025 job market

Published

3 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Jace Porter

For many years, the rule of thumb was that working hard will guarantee some level of success. But according to Wall Street veteran Jamie Dimon, for the generations now entering the workforce, hard work alone won’t cut it. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, successful individuals will have to be armed with the tools needed in specific sectors.

“When you graduate, whether it’s high school, or community college, or college, you need the skills to get the job,” Dimon said in a recent interview with CNN. “It’s not enough anymore to say, ‘I can work hard.’ In the old days, you could be in 10th grade, go get a factory job in Detroit, and eventually you could afford a family, a home, a car, and that may not be true anymore.”

Dimon’s words will resonate with many. Even in the past few years, buying a home has become increasingly unaffordable for first-time buyers. Per data from the National Association of Realtors, in 2022 its housing affordability index stood at 108, with a value of 100 representing a family with the median income having exactly enough income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home.

By 2025, this had dropped to 97.4, meaning the average American family trying to buy their first home doesn’t have the income to qualify for a mortgage on a median-priced home.

Likewise, childcare costs have skyrocketed compared with a few decades ago. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis charting tuition, school fees, and childcare across an average of U.S. cities has increased from an index of 100 in 1983 to 897 by September 2025.

In the face of an increased cost of living, younger workers now graduating and entering the workforce are more concerned than their older counterparts about the threat of artificial intelligence. Nearly one in five Gen Z workers reported being deeply worried that artificial intelligence will put them out of work within the next two years, according to a recent survey from Deutsche Bank Research. But their older peers are notably less alarmed: While nearly a quarter of young adults ages 18 to 34 gave high scores of concern on a 0 to 10 scale, only about one in 10 baby boomers and Gen Xers (ages 55 and above) expressed comparable anxiety.

Dimon said that AI and coding are areas where “we know we need the skills,” adding that speedy industry training courses also present paths to secure employment: “And it works, those things work. We just have to get people to invest in them.”

Many of the nation’s fastest-growing job markets are in highly specialized sectors—some of which require no degree but do require technical training. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for job growth in 2023–33, released last year, wind turbine service technicians came in first with a growth rate of 60% and median annual pay of just under $62,000. No degree is required.

Second was solar photovoltaic installers with a growth rate of 48% and annual pay of a little under $49,000—again, no degree required.

Plumbers and electricians in demand

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also urged job market entrants to explore skills-focused roles adjacent to the immediate technology sector.

While the billions being invested into AI have pushed up valuations courtesy of promised efficiencies and streamlining, Huang points out that it will also have real-world impacts when it comes to building data centers and the wider infrastructure needed to support the shift.

“If you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, a carpenter—we’re going to need hundreds of thousands of them to build all of these factories,” Huang told Channel 4 News in the U.K. in September. “The skilled craft segment of every economy is going to see a boom. You’re going to have to be doubling and doubling and doubling every single year.”

Huang isn’t alone. Earlier this year BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told an energy conference he has warned the White House about the shortage of workers needed to support the rollout: “I’ve even told members of the Trump team that we’re going to run out of electricians that we need to build out AI data centers. We just don’t have enough.”

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Jamie Dimon says he still reads customer complaints himself because his staff filters too much: ‘The bureaucracy does want to control you’

Published

4 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Jace Porter

Jamie Dimon doesn’t trust hierarchy to tell him the truth.

The JPMorgan Chase CEO, who runs a $4.5 trillion bank with 300,000 employees, still reads customer complaints himself, a habit that, he says, keeps him connected to reality inside one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.

“I still read customer complaints,” Dimon said at the America Business Forum in Miami on Thursday. “If they ask you a question, you’ve got to respond to me directly and not go up that chain of command. The chain of command starts to edit it and fine-tune it. The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you’ve got to kill the bureaucracy.”

For Dimon, bureaucracy is a reflex that creeps into any large institution and shields leaders from reality. He sees it as a constant fight.

“If you’re in a position like mine, you’ve got to break down those barriers all the time,” he said.

Instead, Dimon prizes what he calls constant curiosity. He starts every morning reading five newspapers and still takes time to visit branches with his management team.

“Get on the bus and go to a branch,” he said. “Talk to people. You’ll learn something: something stupid we do, something that doesn’t work, or something they did better at another bank.”

That hands-on approach, he said, forces him to stay grounded inside a firm with 300,000 employees in 60 countries.

“Once your mind closes, you’re not going to make a lot of progress,” Dimon said.

Culture, he added, is what keeps a company from collapsing under its own weight. “You better be relentless,” he told the crowd. “People don’t believe what you write in memos, they believe what you do. They see you fire bad people or a client who mistreats employees. That’s how they know you mean it.”

He’s also learned to value plainspoken communication. Early in his career, Dimon said, he underestimated its power. Now, every message from his office is written in his own voice, stripped of what he calls “corporate pablum.”

For Dimon, the danger is internal complacency. In his view, once bureaucracy takes hold, “it kills a company’s ability to think.”

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