Meet R2-D2: AI-Powered 'Digital Workers' Prepared to Work Alongside Humans

When the affable robot R2-D2 was first introduced to the world by George Lucas in his 1977 film 'Star Wars' little did we know that 48 years down the pipeline he would be absorbed into the banking industry. However unthinkable the notion may be, the Bank of New York Mellon announced that it has deployed dozens of artificial intelligence-powered “digital employees” that operate with human employees, and even have their own company login credentials.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Similar to human employees, these digital workers have direct managers they report to and work autonomously in areas like coding and payment instruction validation, said Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell. Soon they’ll have access to their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams, she said.

What the bank, also known as BNY, calls “digital workers,” other banks may refer to as “AI agents.” And while the industry lacks a clear consensus on exact terminology, it’s clear that the technology has a growing presence in financial services.

“This is the next level,” Russell told the Journal. “I’m sure in six months’ time it will become very, very prevalent.”

BNY said its AI Hub developed two digital employee personas in three months, according to Adrienne Russell. One persona is engineered to identify and resolve coding vulnerabilities, while the other verifies payment instructions. Each persona can operate in multiple instances—up to several dozen—with each instance confined to a specific team to limit company wide data access.

Soon, the bank plans to integrate its digital workforce with email addresses and Microsoft Teams access in the near future, enabling these AI personas to proactively communicate with human managers, but will maintain its focus on recruiting top human talent while simultaneously expanding its digital workforce, according to the Journal.

Of course, BNY isn’t the only bank looking to shift work from its human staff to AI. Goldman Sachs has already launched an internal AI assistant to 10,000 of its bankers, traders and asset managers to use. 

In an interview with CNBC, the bank’s Chief Information Officer, Marco Argenti, said the AI assistant will pitch in with basic tasks like proofreading documents and improving language. “Think about all the tasks that you might want to complete with regards to a variety of use cases for all those professions that can be now at your fingertips,” Argenti said. “The AI assistant becomes really like talking to another GS employee."

“As we progress, the second step is when you’re starting to have this agentic behavior, that is, ‘I’m completing a task on behalf of a Goldman employee, and I need to take a set of steps,’” he added. “That’s where the model is going to start to do things like a Goldman employee, not only say things like a Goldman employee.”

At JPMorgan Chase, Chief Analytics Officer Derek Waldron thinks of “digital employees” as more of a helpful model for business people to conceptualize AI tools. "They are fundamentally different from human employees, of course, but also traditional software systems, and so they may need their own type of system connectivity and access management", he said. "It’s an open question exactly how much or how little access to give an agent, and it’s going to have to be figured out on a case-by-case basis."

And while it’s not clear yet exactly what it will look like, he does envision a future where every employee will have an AI assistant and every client experience will have an AI concierge.  Accoriding to the WSJ, 230,000 employees already have access to a general AI chatbot through the company’s proprietary platform, and the goal is to build out more autonomous and more agentic versions of it that are further and further tailored to individual job groups.

According to Scott Mullins, Managing Director of AWS for Financial Servies, the question of how to integrate digital workers with a human workforce is a top issue across the finance industry.

"How do we coordinate that work together?" he said, adding "How do we manage those folks? How do we actually instruct those folks? What’s the new operating model?

"Those are the answers that we’re all working on right now."

Where do states and individuals sit within this futuristic landcscape?  Fortunately, amid the floor chaos on Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill', senators did pass a bipartisan amendment, 99 to 1, to strike language slipped into the bill that would have barred states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade,  The language was removed over concerns about consumer and child safety raised by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA).