Meet Wall Street's latest hire

Wall Street professionals, beware: There’s a new competitor trying to steal your clients, and her name is Sky. She’s fluent in both English and Spanish, fielding client questions around the clock while rocking a professional blazer and a no-nonsense haircut.

Also, Sky isn’t human: She’s Citigroup’s new AI agent, built to help manage roughly $676 billion in client investment assets in the firm’s wealth management division. Powered using Google Cloud and DeepMind, she’s designed to learn from each interaction—becoming more personalized, proactive, and embedded in clients’ financial lives over time.

Wall Street’s AI push

Citi isn’t alone: All across the Street, banks are pouring billions into AI as they race to automate, augment, and outcompete.

• JPMorgan: Spent nearly $20 billion on technology this year, up 10% year over year, while reorganizing its commercial and investment bank to maximize AI usage internally.
• Bank of America: Invested $13 billion in new tech last year and plans to increase that by another 10%. Its virtual assistant Erica has handled more than 3.2 billion client interactions since launch, with over 90% of employees now using internal versions of the tool.
• Wells Fargo: While the firm is not mandating AI adoption, CEO Charles Scharf says generative AI tools have already boosted engineer productivity by up to 35%.
• Goldman Sachs: Set aside roughly $6 billion for tech this year, while partnering with Anthropic to build AI agents focused on trade processing and client onboarding.
• Morgan Stanley: The firm says tools like DevGen.AI have saved over 280,000 hours in just six months, with 72% of interns using tools like ChatGPT regularly.

The trade off

For now, Wall Street executives frame AI as a productivity tool—not a replacement for workers.

But the data tells a different story. The six largest US banks cut roughly 15,000 jobs in the first quarter, with all of them pointing, at least in part, to AI-driven efficiency gains—while reporting an 18% year over year increase in collective profits. Citigroup has gone even further, pledging to reduce its workforce by 20,000 as part of what it calls a broader “productivity and efficiency journey.”

Call it productivity, call it innovation—but on Wall Street, artificial intelligence is starting to have a very real impact.—SY