Bank of America’s annual spending on new, strategic technology initiatives, which includes investments in artificial intelligence, has increased by 44% over the past decade to reach $4 billion in 2025. The executive that’s steering those investments is Hari Gopalkrishnan, a 14-year veteran who was promoted to serve as the chief technology and information officer in late July.Today at Bank of America’s investor day event, Gopalkrishnan will outline the vision for these strategic tech bets and discuss how they tie into the broader $118 billion in tech investments that the company has made over the past decade. It is the first time leadership has held this event in 15 years and Gopalkrishnan, CEO Brian Moynihan, and other C-suite leaders will face investors as Bank of America’s stock has lagged the five other large U.S. banks for the past five years.“We have steadily increased our spend in technology, now up to $13 billion a year, of which $4 billion goes into strategic growth,” Gopalkrishnan tells Fortune ahead of his one-hour investor day panel discussion with two other Bank of America technologists. “We leverage across the enterprise, so every dollar you spend gets the maximum bang for the buck, as opposed to sort of being siloed by line of business.”That means that when Gopalkrishnan deploys new AI tools and functionality, he will prioritize applications that can scale across all eight lines of business, which includes global capital markets, consumer lending, and retail banking. One example of this in action is Erica, an AI virtual assistant that’s surpassed three billion client interactions since the tool launched in 2018. It now averages more than 58 million interactions per month, facilitating chatbot conversations with clients, proactively altering them on changes to their past spending patterns or flagging when they may have been double-charged by a merchant, and answering banking questions. The tool is currently available on Bank of America’s mobile app, but will expand next year to the desktop.In 2020, Bank of America launched Erica for Employees, an internal version of the tool that more than 90% of the company’s global workforce of 213,000 now uses regularly. Erica has helped reduce the number of calls into the company’s IT service desk by 50%. The banking sector has embraced generative AI capabilities at a faster pace than most sectors, with investments focused on AI-enabled chatbots, virtual assistants that can summarize financial documents, fraud monitoring, and assisting employees as they navigate complex international regulatory changes. Generative, predictive, and other forms of AI collectively are projected to generate as much as $340 billion annually in value creation for the global banking sector, consulting giant McKinsey has estimated. Financial giants, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, have also been steadily rolling out new generative AI tools to more employees throughout 2025.At Bank of America, Gopalkrishnan says he’s less incentivized to focus his investments on AI tools that can save a couple minutes on simplistic workplace tasks. “When you look at the end-to-end client journey, they involve like 40-plus processes and thousands of employees,” says Gopalkrishnan. “You start to pick apart that process and reimagine it. That’s when you get ROI.”Bank of America has explored more than 45 different “proof of concept” use cases for generative AI , with 15 of them commercially live today. Some of the priority use cases that Gopalkrishnan is deploying include tools that can summarize or offer search functionality for capital markets and investment banking employees, making it easier to pull real-time market commentary. An in-house built “AskGPS” tool, which was trained on over 3,200 internal documents and presentations, allows employees to ask complex questions on behalf of clients and receive responses within seconds.Bank of America has also invested $1.5 billion into the company’s data capabilities over the past five years, which Gopalkrishnan says was critical to create a foundation that allowed for more AI adoption.Within the technology department, Gopalkrishnan has deployed AI coding assistants that are used by 18,000 developers. There has already been a 20% productivity lift to select parts of the development life cycle that Bank of America has focused its efforts on.Gopalkrishnan says he’s mostly leaning on one unnamed vendor to support AI-enabled code assistance, but is continuing to explore other tools on a smaller scale. His intent is to standardize the application of these AI coding tools over time to as few vendors as possible.More than 130,000 Bank of America employees are currently authorized to use the enterprise productivity tools and by the end of the year, everyone will have access to them. Bank of America has sought to motivate its workforce by offering AI learning programs that begin by teaching the basics of AI, but also more advanced prompt engineering training.“It’s really a combination of training, education, giving them exposure to the tools, and then ongoing commitment to reskill, as the work changes,” says Gopalkrishnan.John KellSend thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.This story was originally featured on Fortune.com