Digital employees in banks

BNY had 134 digital employees next to about 48,100 human staff, InvestmentNews reported. Rachel Lewis, head of payment operations, said they do "very specific repetitive tasks" that people did a year earlier, and that "the digital employee works 24/7". According to Forrester, each one has a login, an email address and a human manager, its access is scoped, and its rationale is logged for every action. Their tasks include payment validation and code remediation.

The agents run on Eliza, BNY's internal AI platform, which puts models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others under one set of controls. Forrester puts the share of BNY staff who work on Eliza at about 97 percent.

Goldman Sachs worked with Anthropic engineers on agents built on Claude for trade accounting and for client vetting and onboarding. Chief information officer Marco Argenti told InvestmentNews: "Think of it as a digital co-worker for many of the professions within the firm." He called it premature to assume direct job cuts in compliance and accounting.

Software vendors sell digital workers to banks too. Nasdaq Verafin's Agentic AI Workforce starts with a Digital Sanctions Analyst, which clears false-positive sanctions alerts and passes true matches to investigators, and a Digital EDD Analyst for low-risk periodic due diligence reviews. The AI in anti-money laundering page covers the wider use in financial crime work.

A digital employee needs an identity in the bank's access management, with rights no wider than its task, and its human manager answers for its work as for any team member. Under DORA the agent platform and the model provider behind it are ICT services. The AI agent governance page covers owners, limits and logs.

In Germany, the works council has a right of co-determination over technical systems that can monitor the behavior or performance of staff, under section 87 of the Works Constitution Act. An agent platform that logs work next to human colleagues can fall under it.

A digital employee is an AI agent that does a defined job in a company and is managed like a staff member: it has a login, permissions, a manager and a record of its work.

BNY reported 134 digital employees next to about 48,100 people. Forrester counted more than 130 in production, up from 70 less than a year earlier.

The banks say they take over narrow, repetitive tasks. BNY says people did these tasks a year earlier; Goldman's CIO called it premature to assume direct job cuts in compliance and accounting.