The story of Erica, Bank of America’s homegrown digital assistant
Mar 31, 2025
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Hari Gopalkrishnan, who leads Bank of America’s Consumer, Business & Wealth Management Technology team, shares insights on the creation of Erica, the bank's innovative digital assistant. He discusses the early challenges of using natural language processing, the vital need for collaboration across departments, and how user feedback shaped Erica's development. Gopalkrishnan highlights the assistant’s rapid growth in interactions, its expansion into multiple lines of business, and the role of generative AI in enhancing its functionality and user experience.
Bank of America developed Erica to simplify banking tasks for users through natural language processing, enhancing the overall customer experience.
The digital assistant's expansion into wealth management and corporate support demonstrates its versatility and ability to adapt to diverse organizational needs.
Deep dives
Introduction of Erica and Its Development
Erica, Bank of America's digital assistant, was launched in 2018 to enhance customer interactions with the bank’s services. The development was motivated by the realization that users struggled to navigate an increasingly complex mobile banking app, leading to many still relying on branches and call centers. By leveraging natural language processing, Erica allows users to communicate in everyday language, making banking tasks simpler and more intuitive. This user-centric design aimed to surprise customers with insights about their finances, further improving the overall banking experience.
Technological Challenges and Solutions
Building the technology behind Erica involved navigating a volatile landscape of available natural language processing (NLP) tools, where many potential solutions were either lacking or unreliable. The team ultimately decided to employ open-source NLP engines, augmented by insights from linguistics experts, to create a solution tailored for financial contexts. This required a thorough assessment of existing software capabilities and a strong collaboration between engineering and user experience teams to ensure a cohesive product. The resulting integrated approach facilitated smoother interactions between the technology and the banking environment, allowing Erica to understand user intents accurately.
Expansion Beyond Consumer Banking
Initially focused on consumer banking, Erica has expanded its functionality to assist in wealth management and internal employee support, showcasing its versatility. For instance, in wealth management, Erica powers the Ask Merrill platform, enabling associates to quickly access policy information to assist clients efficiently. Additionally, Erika is being used internally to streamline employee inquiries, significantly reducing call center workloads and enhancing productivity. This shift not only improves customer service but also showcases the digital assistant's capability to adapt to various organizational needs effectively.
The Future Role of Generative AI
Generative AI is expected to play a critical role in the next phase of Erica’s development, particularly in enhancing natural language understanding and interaction capabilities. The integration of large language models aims to improve classification, summarization, and conversation context during interactions with human agents. By enabling more natural conversations, Erica could reduce the time agents spend on resolving customer inquiries, leading to faster and more satisfying customer experiences. Ongoing exploration of innovative use cases continues to focus on how technology can better serve customers and align with Bank of America’s strategic objectives.
Banking digital assistants may be common now, but in 2017, Bank of America was one of the first to be thinking about how they make the firm’s customer experience more powerful. The answer was an in-house build of a digital assistant that required the firm to hire PhDs in linguistics and build a collaboration structure that could facilitate teams from different departments.
In 2024, BofA clients interacted with Erica 676 million times bringing its total interactions since its launch in 2018 to 2.5 billion.
On the show today, Hari Gopalkrishnan, who leads Bank of America’s Consumer, Business & Wealth Management Technology team, joins us to tell the tale of how the firm built its industry-leading digital assistant, Erica.
Hari shares how the firm has gradually expanded Erica’s remit beyond consumer banking to also include multiple lines of business and individual and corporate clients across the firm’s global footprint.
It's a dive into what it takes to push the boundaries in this industry, how the firm thought about development, testing, expansion, and how Erica’s capabilities can be expanded with the recent innovations of Gen AI.
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