Bank of America gives Merrill Lynch an AI makeover

Merrill Lynch’s “thundering herd” of investment advisors is turning into a desk-bound pack of AI prompters.

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Financial advisors at Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch and Private Bank units are being given AI tools that work with their Salesforce customer relationship management software and Zoom meeting software to help them prepare for client meetings, summarize meetings and plan their next steps, the bank said Thursday morning.

About 15,000 employees across Merrill and Private Bank will have access to the new tools in the first phase of the rollout.

“The day-to-day advisor workflow has already changed significantly in the last six months, and we think it’s going to change more in another six months, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, and that trend is just going to continue,” said Inez Louzonis, managing director of Merrill Lynch.

Louzonis noted that $124 trillion in assets is expected to shift from older baby boomers to their millennial and Gen Z offspring. She also said there’s an estimated industry-wide advisor shortage of about 100,000 advisors over the next 10 years. At the same time, client expectations are rising.

“All this means is that we need to help our advisors scale their business,” she said. “We need to deliver more effectively for our clients than ever before, and we also need to help them capture that wealth transfer. And we think that AI is a key enabler of that. It’ll help our advisors capture the assets, serve our clients seamlessly, and ultimately spend more time doing the work that truly adds value.”

Bank of America’s use of AI within Salesforce and Zoom speaks to an emerging trend of banks and other companies customizing enterprise software with agentic AI and large language models. It suggests that fears of a dreaded “saaspocalypose” — in which traditional software is ditched for agentic AI models — may be overblown. Companies may instead use AI to customize enterprise software to meet their specific needs.

Bank of America’s goal with its latest AI initiative is to help its financial advisors spend more time with their clients, get rid of administrative tasks and give them access to data in a timely way, Louzonis said.

This, in turn, should allow advisors to help their clients navigate volatile markets, tax changes and an uncertain macroeconomic environment, she said.

“While predictive AI and other data analytics were gradually eliminating the drudge work of financial advisors, generative AI is proving to truly turbo-charge advisors,” said Alenka Grealish, lead, emerging tech intelligence and advisory services at Celent. “Merrill Lynch’s latest AI initiative serves as a bellwether for the shift from deploying AI at discrete workflow stages to integrating it end-to-end. With a greater ability to spend time adding value for their clients, advisors will also have greater job gratification, enabling Merrill to better retain talent.”

What the new AI tools do

Bank of America’s financial advisors already use a version of the bank’s AI-based Erica virtual assistant called Ask Merrill; the private bankers use a similar assistant called Ask PB. These help advisors analyze client data, summarize information and generate ideas.

The new AI initiative is a “meeting journey” the bank’s engineers configured, working with Salesforce and Zoom, for the millions of meetings advisors and private bankers have to plan, prepare for and follow up on every year.

“They have to capture notes, they have to summarize those notes, summarize discussions, send a follow-up, save the notes and then handle all the service-related follow-up tasks that come from that,” Louzonis said. “That process probably takes at least four hours. It can take much more, depending on the complexity of the client and the complexity of their financial needs.”

One of the Salesforce AI tools is what the bank calls “Plan my day.”

“Think of this as our advisors’ daily to-do list,” said Paula Hanson, Private Bank platforms and enablement executive at Bank of America. “This is where they can see suggestions on what to focus on for the day. Things like, what are the meetings I have for today or upcoming? What are the upcoming milestones for my clients, so whose birthday is coming up, whose anniversaries are coming up, and what are the tasks that are coming due?”

The bank has enabled several meeting prep tools within Salesforce that can automatically summarize all of the information on a client that exists in the customer relationship management software, including any relevant meeting notes, open opportunities, open tasks, the client’s financials, the client’s interests and any servicing interactions. The tool provides suggested talking points and next best actions.

When the meeting starts, Zoom AI will kick in to provide automated summarization.

Afterward, the meeting notes are housed in a meeting hub within Salesforce.

“The advisor can then review those notes, edit as needed, and save them to the client record,” Hanson said. “You can then go back to the meeting hub and review any of those notes from those prior interactions with your client.”

Another tool called “meeting follow up” takes the notes from the meeting and suggests tasks and opportunities.

“It captures life and business milestones, so it eliminates that administrative burden of entering that information manually into the system,” Hanson said. “It creates that benefit of ensuring that we’re tracking and assigning tasks from the meetings, and it also captures client interests and key milestones that might have been mentioned in the meeting, to ensure that we’re not missing a beat.”

The last part of the meeting journey is a conversational assistant created within the CRM.

“Whether you’re in a meeting or you’re just researching or answering questions about a client or an advisor’s book of business, you can use this AI assistant within the CRM platform to help you find information across the system,” Hanson said. It could summarize information about a client, or about an entire book of business, for example.

“For us, the goal is to get a comprehensive preparation so that we can focus on strategic thinking versus just busywork,” said Shane Waarbroek, wealth management advisor at the bank. “It gives us the capacity to think about strategy versus logistics. It allows us to personalize at scale.”

Using the meeting journey, “we can actually focus on specific things that we wanted to discuss across the client base,” Waarbroek said. “The meeting quality isn’t dependent on how much time we had to prepare, because it’s all been minimized and crunched in just a couple minutes, and then every client experience has the same high standards.”

Meeting prep that used to take 45 minutes now takes only a few minutes, he said.

“In the past, I would have to pass it on to a junior partner and pass it on to her client associate to look through the notes and assign the task,” he said. “Now, I click a couple of buttons. It’s done in two minutes, it’s more reliable and everything gets taken care of very quickly.”

The same is true for meeting summaries and follow-ups, he said. In the past, a junior partner would generate meeting notes and send them to the client, “but this process was actually condensed down into just a couple clicks.”

This kind of AI help “is at its best when it reduces friction around the human relationship rather than trying to replace it,” said Bradley Leimer, founder and principal of Leimer One Advisors. “Using AI to prepare for meetings, summarize conversations, surface milestones, and recommend next best actions removes administrative drag and gives advisors more time to focus on what actually matters, the actual human-to-human conversation between client and advisor. The real value in wealth management has never been typing notes into a CRM, it has always been judgment, trust, empathy, and the ability to help clients make sound decisions when markets are volatile, like they have been this past year, or when life becomes complicated.”

AI-infused workflows will continue to take on a larger role in wealth management and other business units “because they make relationship management much more efficient and in the end, surprisingly more personal because they retain knowledge of every aspect of the relationship,” Leimer said. “Bank of America implementing these tools feels less like a surprise and more like a long-overdue institutionalization of what has already been happening across wealth management, brokerage and every form of relationship banking.”