BNY gets 20K employees building AI agents with OpenAI

BNY, a massive financial institution handling over $57 trillion in assets, isn’t just dipping its toes into AI — it’s diving in headfirst. Rather than restricting AI experiments to a small tech team, the bank built an internal platform called Eliza that now has 20,000 employees actively building their own AI agents. The results are impressive: legal review time dropped by 75%, and there are over 125 live use cases across the company. The key to their success? A “governance by design” approach that pairs OpenAI’s frontier models with strict oversight from cross-disciplinary review boards covering everything from IP rights to cybersecurity. Instead of treating governance as a bottleneck, BNY found it actually accelerated deployment by giving teams guardrails to build confidently. The company’s mantra is “AI for everyone, everywhere, and in everything,” positioning AI as the future operating system of banking rather than just another tool. Why it matters: BNY’s approach proves that even the most heavily regulated industries can scale AI safely when they embed governance into the platform itself — a blueprint other risk-averse organizations will likely follow.