Bank of America’s AI Assistant Erica Passes 1.5 Billion Interactions

Bank of America customers have interacted with its AI assistant Erica more than 1.5 billion times since its 2018 debut, according to the bank. The AI-powered chatbot responds to more than 56 million requests per month as the ‘digital concierge’ helps more people with more financial management tasks, hitting 333 million requests this year through July, a 35% increase from the previous year at the same time.

Erica Accelerated

Created to provide intuitive self-service banking, Erica was one of the first banking AI assistants and can check balances, transfer money, find ATMs, and handle other bank-related errands. The AI has interacted with more than 37 million Bank of America customers since its debut. Last year, users spent over 3 million hours chatting with Erica, a 31% yearly increase. They now engage with it for advice and insights over 60% of the time rather than just transactions.

The most common uses of Erica now are monitoring subscriptions and bills and analyzing spending habits. For example, clients check for merchant refunds 863,000 times per month and get FICO score updates 267,000 times. Erica has also added intelligent call routing capabilities to connect clients with specialists for complex needs beyond self-service .

“Erica’s controlled AI has become a primary gateway to personalization, and it continues to evolve with our clients’ financial needs,” Bank of America chief digital officer and CMO David Tyrie explained in a statement. “It took four years to reach the first billion interactions, but client engagement with Erica is accelerating, and it will easily exceed 2 billion within a few months. Our clients appreciate how simple and intuitive Erica is, and they trust it’s only using proprietary, vetted data.”

Erica saw rapid growth over the last few years, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions for physical bank visits. Bank of America augmented Erica to understand more than 60,000 phrases and questions related to the virus and the bank’s plans as a result. Of course, Bank of America isn’t alone in exploring new ways to apply AI and virtual assistants. U.S. Bank launched a voice assistant for both English and Spanish, and Wells Fargo has a Fargo AI assistant running on Google Cloud. There’s also been some notable interest in acquiring startups with finance-focused conversational AI capabilities.

The rush to incorporate generative AI has come to financial service providers as well. Intuit recently embedded a Generative AI operating system (GenOS) using large language models (LLMs) across its brands, including financial service providers like Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, providing the base for those companies to build generative AI tools and assistants tailored for their customers.

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