A fund manager in Hong Kong emails BNY at 2 a.m. New York time about a transfer that hasn’t settled. A software agent can read it, pull the records and draft a reply. A human manager reviews the draft before it goes out, Microsoft reported in a case study published in May.

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That agent is one of about 140 digital employees at BNY, PYMNTS reported in April. Each one has login credentials, an employee number in the corporate directory and a supervisor who assigns tasks and reviews the work.

Getting from an idea to a working agent takes 16 steps of review boards, compliance gates and model risk evaluations at BNY, Microsoft said. The bank moves $2.5 trillion in transactions a day. A misrouted payment can freeze a billion-dollar transfer.

Managers track each digital employee on a live dashboard, which shows processed volume, cycle times, missed transactions and approval outcomes. When reviewers kept sending back the payments agent’s responses, its team coached and retrained it the way it would a new hire. The pushback came from reviewers’ old habits, not from wrong answers.

That payments agent replaced scripted bots that kept breaking. Maintaining them took so much effort that “the humans were effectively doing two jobs instead of one,” Rachel Lewis, who leads AI enablement for BNY’s operations, told Microsoft.

The agent got one job. It reads the vendor address on a cross-border payment, confirms the country code and passes the payment to a person for review.

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