BNY builds “AI for everyone, everywhere” with OpenAI

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, BNY made a decisive move to embrace generative AI across the enterprise. Rather than limiting experimentation to a few technologists, the firm created a centralized AI Hub, launched an internal AI deployment and education platform called Eliza, and trained its employees on responsible AI use.

“Our mantra is ‘AI for everyone, everywhere, and in everything,’” says Sarthak Pattanaik, Chief Data and AI Officer at BNY. “This technology is too transformative, and we decided to take a platform-based approach for execution.”

That platform now supports over 125 live use cases, with 20,000 employees actively building agents.

From its start, Eliza was designed not just as a tool, but as a system of work, pairing BNY’s governance rigor with leading models—including OpenAI frontier models—to help employees build safely and confidently.

“We’re not building side projects,” Pattanaik says. “We’re changing how the bank works.”

Maintaining trust in a systemically important institution

BNY plays a systemically important role in the global economy, managing, moving, and safeguarding assets, data, and cash across more than 100 markets. As one of the world’s largest financial institutions, with more than $57.8 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration, trust is non-negotiable.

“We are much like the circulatory system of the global financial services ecosystem,” says Pattanaik. “And from that perspective, we must ensure trust is built into everything we do.”

With that level of responsibility, deploying AI couldn’t be an afterthought or a side experiment. BNY needed an approach that balanced innovation with accountability.

“A lot of folks could have said, you have such a huge responsibility - maybe we’ll wait and see what happens with AI. We believe AI is going to be like the operating system of technology going forward.”

—Sarthak Pattanaik, Chief Data and AI Officer, BNY