Bank of America’s big bet on AI started small

Bank of America will invest $4 billion in AI and related technology innovations this year, but the financial services giant’s 7-year-old homemade AI agent, Erica, remains a key ROI generator, linchpin for customer and employee experience, and source of great pride today.

Few used the term agent, let alone agentic AI, in 2018, but the bank built a team of software engineers, linguistic specialists, and banking experts to create the small language model, which has been tuned over the years using customer feedback data from the call center.

Hari Gopalkrishnan, head of consumer, business, and wealth management technology at BofA, says the key to Erica’s success and longevity has been its small size.

“We are not writing essays with Erica. We are not trying to write software. We’re trying to understand short bursts of information a customer asks us because they don’t want to hunt and peck on a menu on a screen that’s got 50 different things, and basically be able to translate, what does the customer really mean when they say, ‘I want to pay a bill’?” Gopalkrishnan says. “How do we understand the short burst of conversation that the customer would want?

“We trained the model to do just that,” he says about Erica, which is built on open-source models. “Over time, it went from a model that was 80% accurate to 85% to well in the north of 90% accurate. It also let us be more predictive in what the model would do.” 

Gopalkrishnan says the Bank of America was able to tune Erica during the pandemic to enable customers to apply for PPP loans and handle a multitude of business and consumer needs. He will embrace generative AI and agentic AI offerings as they evolve but believes that most of the bank’s customers requirements can be built in house.

9 IT skills where expertise pays the most

Tech companies still hold a competitive edge when it comes to salaries, despite mass layoffs across the industry in recent years. Despite reductions in staff, there are tech skills that continue to demand a premium salary, driving industry competition to hire talent with the right skills.

The average annual salary for tech professionals inside the tech industry is $114,861, while those outside it earn about $108,674, according to the Dice 2025 Tech Salary Report. For salaries within the tech industry, that’s a 2.2% growth year over year, while tech salaries in outside industries have seen a slight decline of .5% year over year.

However, expertise in these particular nine skills is likely to earn you a pay bump across any industry, as technology has become vital for typical business operations. Dice compared salary data from those who identified as experts in these skillsets to those who reported using the skills regularly, uncovering a premium for expert-level tech professionals with these skillsets. Read on to find out how such expertise can make you stand out in any industry.

Artificial Intelligence

Average salary: $130,277

Expertise premium: $23,525 (15%)

AI tops the list as the skill that can earn you the highest pay bump, earning tech professionals nearly an 18% premium over other tech skills. As one of the most sought-after skills on the market right now, organizations everywhere are eager to embrace AI as a business tool. AI skills broadly include programming languages, database modeling, data analysis and visualization, machine learning (ML), statistics, natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and AI ethics. It’s a wide-ranging skillset and each company’s needs will vary depending on their business goals, but it’s a lucrative skill in the current hiring market.

5 tips for transforming company data into new revenue streams

Enterprises worldwide are harboring massive amounts of data. Although data has always accumulated naturally, the result of ever-growing consumer and business activity, data growth is expanding exponentially, opening opportunities for organizations to monetize unprecedented amounts of information.

Data can be effectively monetized by transforming it into a product or service the market values, says Kathy Rudy, chief data and analytics officer with technology research and advisory firm ISG. She notes that her firm works with a variety of data-rich clients. “In the course of our work, with our clients’ permission, we collect data and enter it into our databases. We then transform that data into products that help our clients compare themselves to peers, and understand which providers are best suited to support their strategic initiatives.”

Interest in turning enterprise data into new revenue is soaring. According to the 2025 State of the CIO survey, 38% of IT leaders say monetizing company data is the most significant business initiative driving their IT investments this year — the No. 1 such initiative, more than double the 16% who said the same last year.

If you’re among those IT leaders looking to transform your company’s data into new revenue, here are several key tips and insights from data experts who’ve done it.

Emphasize product development fundamentals

“Data monetization is no different than creating and selling other products,” says Adam Yong, founder of AI-enabled content generator Agility Writer. “It requires ideation, market research, pricing analysis, and go-to-market plans.”

That’s why Young suggests developing a structured product development process first.

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