Latest news with #digitalemployees
Forbes
13-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Digital Employees Will Mean We Need Non-Human Resources Departments
BEIJING, CHINA - MARCH 26: Humanoid robots work at an information desk at Zhongguancun International ... More Innovation Center, venue for the 2025 Zhongguancun Forum (Photo by Li He/VCG via Getty Images). The Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase, Derek Waldron, suggests that 'digital employees' is a helpful model to help those of us in business to think about how AI tools will used. Meanwhile, Bank of New York Mellon now employs dozens of AI 'digital employees' that have company logins so they can work alongside its human staff. Digital Employees Are Here In James Boyle's fascinating book 'The Line', he argues that a debate over the personhood of AI agents is inevitable and suggests that our existing legal frameworks will come under strain trying to resolve the complex social, political and legal issues that attend such debate. He is right, of course, and recent developments must make us think more carefully about what these development mean for the evolution of the enterprise. A digital employee is an agent designed to autonomously perform tasks that are traditionally performed by trained people. Unlike traditional rule-based software that follows simples instructions, agents can learn and adapt to a complex environment and make decisions similar to humans. As enterprises begin to deploy these kinds of systems, how we are going to resolve such as issues as: The issues are not new. I remember reading Jerry Kaplan's "Humans Need Not Apply' a few years ago and this helped me to develop some of my own thoughts about personhood (including the ability to own assets) for AIs at a time when I'd been thinking about issues around reputation management (and management of reputation in the context of punishing AIs for misbehaving). This naturally led me ask myself whether Kaplan calls 'forged laborers' would need digital identities linked to legal personhood, or whether they would be the property (in some way I can't think through, because I'm not a lawyer) of real-world legal entities of one form or another? I rather thought then that they would in the future have to have some kind of digital identity. My reasoning was that interactions in the virtual world are interactions between virtual identities (personas) and in my specific worldview, virtual identities need underlying digital identities. Whether the underlying digital identities of robots need to be bound to real-world legal entities is then a regulatory issue, not a technical one and either possibility could work. As of now, I tend to think that we will have both solutions in place but in different timescales. Employment. BNY's Chief Information Officer Leigh-Ann Russell says that their digital employees have their own logins and can directly access the same apps as human employees so that they can work autonomously and that soon they will have their own email accounts and may even be able to communicate with colleagues in other ways like through Microsoft Teams (I wonder if they will be required to keep their cameras on during calls!). Each 'persona' (a digital employee with a specifc job, such as cleaning up code) can exist in a few dozen instances, and each instance is assigned to work narrowly within a particular team. These digital employees are property—tools operated by or on behalf of the business entity that deploys them—and the legal and economic relationships around output quality, liability and so on are all assigned to the company. I asked Jo Levy, a partner at The Norton Law Firm in California and Chair of the Alliance for Responsible Data Collection (ARDC), who was speaking in Geneva this week at the UN's "AI for Good' Global Summit, about this and she agreed that legal entity status for AI Agents and robot-workers is inevitable but explained that the property vs personhood issue is not real a dichotomy: AI Agents can be 'owned' and be persons under the law, just as corporations are owned by shareholders but can sue and be sued, own property and be held criminally liable for crimes. She also pointed out that agency law already exists and hundreds of years of jurisprudence could easily be applied to digital employees so it seems to me that as most jurisdictions already have such well-developed laws governing agents acting on another's behalf and there is no obvious reason that these could not be extended or adapted to AI agents relatively quickly. Agents as agents, so to speak, is clearly the right way to think about digital employees now, but as these agents (or more likely, networks of agents) make more complex decisions, so assigning liability, to choose an obvious hard care, might be come even more complex. This is why, in the longer term, some kind of limited legal personhood, like the electronic agent personhood mentioned above, might simplify accountability (and insurance) so that these digital employees could become parties to litigation. Digital Employees Have Rights The 2017 European Parliament report on 'Civil Law Rules on Robotics' made just such a suggestion about creating a specific legal status of "electronic persons' as a pragmatic legal tool to address the liability gaps that could arise when highly autonomous systems act without direct human control. The suggestion was not taken up at the time (the European Commission was not obliged to act on the recommendations) but I think it has some merit. Limited personhood for advanced AIs as a means of assigning liability, but not full legal personhood seems a good next step. Levy pointed out that such a new legal status could be used to provide disclosures to others about the parameters of the AI agent's behavior: A digital employee might be required to act in the best interests of the corporation, to choose an obvious example. This isn't only about AI by the way. Similar approaches have been suggested for 'smart' 'contracts' as well. Not because of any moral presumptions about the persistent script's immortal sole, but for economy expedience when constructing distributed autonomous organisations (DAOs). Wyoming has already passed laws giving limited liability company (LLC)-like status to DAOs and some people see this as a step towards more distinct recognition of AI-driven collectives. (Both real corporations and DAOs might be required to pay registration fees for digital employees that are assigned legal identities. I had not thought about the idea of a digital payroll tax, but it seems a suggestion that deserves consideration.) I cannot help but agree with Alon Jackson, CEO and Co-Founder of Astrix Security, when he says that companies at the forefront of the new era of agentic business will be those that understand that managing digital employees is not "a niche IT issue but as a strategic board-level imperative". Personally, I suspect that the Non-Human Resources Department will find life much easier than the Human-Resources Department because the digital bankers can be programmed not to get drunk, not to take stupid risks and not to engage in insider-trading or interest rate-fixing!
Finextra
03-07-2025
- Business
- Finextra
BNY to give AI-powered 'digital employees' their own emails
Bank of New York Mellon has given dozens of AI agent 'digital employees' their own logins and will soon provide them with email accounts. 0 BNY chief information officer Leigh-Ann Russell tells the Wall Street Journal that the bank's AI hub has created two worker personas: one that cleans up code and another that validates payment instructions. The agents have direct managers and, because they have their own logins to access apps like their human colleagues, can work autonomously. Each instance of the agent works in a defined narrow team to avoid giving them access to too much information. BNY is planning to give the digital employees their own email accounts and possibly access to Microsoft Teams so that they can contact their human colleagues with issues. The bank also intends to build agents to carry out other tasks but stresses it is still hiring humans.
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Why this bank is hiring full-time AI employees
Banks are embracing the AI workforce —but some institutions are taking unexpected approaches to its deployment. The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) has dozens of so-called digital employees working alongside its human counterparts. And distinguishing those AI -driven colleagues might become more difficult in the months ahead. Rather than quietly working in the background, digital workers are integrated into the broader BNY team—and soon they'll have their own email accounts and ability to participate in Microsoft Teams meetings. Whereas many companies are still working to determine how best to incorporate AI into their day-to-day operations, BNY has embraced it in the form of digital staffers who work under the auspices of human supervisors. There are, per The Wall Street Journal, two separate AI personas the bank has built: One focuses on coding; the other is dedicated to validating payment instructions. Each persona is deployed across specific teams, with data access siloed for security reasons. New personas, which will specialize in different areas, are in the works now. These aren't digital assistants. Armed with individual login credentials, NBY's AI workers can access the same tools as human workers. If they spot a problem or vulnerability, they're able to write and implement a patch (though it must first be approved by a human manager). In the future, BNY aims to give its digital workforce access to email and Microsoft Teams, enabling the AI to contact human managers when it faces a problem it can't resolve on its own. While other banks are utilizing AI, most still use the technology as a far less empowered support tool for the human workforce. For example, earlier this month Goldman Sachs launched the GS AI Assistant, an AI program that lets workers across its divisions communicate with large language models for efficiency gains. The tool offers coding suggestions, translates foreign languages, and summarizes complex documents for workers. That's a far cry from the semi-independent state of BNY's digital workers, and the tasks it undertakes are much more mundane. Despite its innovative tech, BNY emphasized to The Wall Street Journal that it's not adopting an AI-first approach. Human hiring is not slowing down at present, even as more AI workers are developed. That's understandable. Several companies that have gone all-in on AI have scaled back those efforts and resumed hiring humans amid pushback from customers who don't want human jobs to be assumed by AI. 'The possibility that AI tools might completely take over tasks previously handled by humans, rather than just assist with them, stirs up deep concerns and worries,' wrote Harvard University marketing professor Julian De Freitas earlier this year. There's some rationale behind those concerns. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last month that he believed AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, a move that he said could cause unemployment to spike to between 10% and 20%. He's not the only one sounding an alarm. In April, Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer, warned that AI is increasingly putting entry-level jobs under threat. And there are a growing number of stories from workers who saw their six-figure-earning jobs disappear without notice, bringing chaos to their lives. Meanwhile, venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee has called predictions that AI will displace 50% of jobs by 2027 ' uncannily accurate.' But for BNY, the AI revolution is, at present, more about adding to the workforce without inflating the company's payroll budget. And as a bonus, these coworkers won't take the last cup of coffee from the break room either.
Fast Company
26-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Salesforce is using AI for up to 50% of its workload and its AI product is 93% accurate, says CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff said the company now relies on artificial intelligence for 30% to 50% of its entire workload. The software giant, like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Microsoft and Google, is going all in on the AI boom. 'All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things, that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work,' Benioff told Bloomberg, including positions like software engineering and customer service. 'It's these agents, these digital laborers, digital employees who are out there doing this work servicing the customers, selling to the customer, marketing to the customer, partnering with me to do the analytics, do the marketing, the branding.' Benioff said he even writes his yearly business plan with an AI partner, along with a 'human' Salesforce executive, adding the company was on track to have one billion of these 'agents' before the end of the year. (65% of companies are now experimenting with AI agents, according to an April KPMG survey.) Benioff also estimated that Salesforce has reached 93% accuracy with the AI product it's selling to customers, including Walt Disney Co., which was developed to carry out tasks such as customer service without human supervision. Benioff added that it's not 'realistic' to reach 100% accuracy, and that other companies are at 'much lower levels because they don't have as much data and metadata.' The software giant was ranked the No. 1 customer relationship management (CRM) software provider in 2025 for the 12th consecutive year; its clients include Apple, Boeing, Amazon, Walmart and McDonald's, just to name a few. According to Bloomberg, AI is ushering in a new era of 'the tiny team.' Gone are the days when Silicon Valley companies rapidly hire as they scale; now tech companies are in a race to the bottom, competing to see who can manage the lowest headcount in an effort to cut costs, and increase efficiencies. The AI boom comes at a time when many tech companies are slashing jobs, in part to keep up with inflation and increased economic uncertainty, spurred on by the Trump administration's tariffs, and conflict with Iran. Salesforce by the numbers Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was trading up less than 1% on Thursday at the time of this writing in midday trading. In the company's latest round of earnings for the first quarter, which ended April 30, the company reported revenue of $9.8 billion, up nearly 8% year-over-year, beating analyst expectations, and raised guidance 'by $400 million to $41.3 billion at the high end of the range.' Earnings per share (EPS) came in at $2.58, topping estimates of $2.55 by $.03. Benioff said Salesforce has 'built a deeply unified enterprise AI platform—with agents, data, apps, and a metadata platform… with Agentforce, Data Cloud, our Customer 360 apps, Tableau, and Slack all built on one trusted, unified foundation, [so] companies of every size can build a digital labor force—boosting productivity, reducing costs, and accelerating growth.' The company had a market capitalization of $257 billion at the time of this writing. Its next earnings report is scheduled for late August.
Bloomberg
26-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
We Can't Afford to Rush the March of AI Agents
If there was a singular buzzword to emerge at Asia's largest tech conference last week, it was 'agents.' I jotted it down more than a dozen times from various executive talks and seminars at Taiwan's Computex. Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang described them as future 'digital employees.' An executive at a semiconductor firm referred to agentic AI as 'the next paradigm shift.' I watched countless demo videos featuring bots taking on increasingly complex tasks in users' work and personal lives — from putting together a marketing presentation to turning off the lights in your child's bedroom after they've fallen asleep.
