BNY's Eliza programme is in the press again. Use the bank's numbers.

You've probably watched a magazine write a bigger number than the company will put in its own annual report. When the primary and the magazine disagree, print the primary. BNY's annual report puts 160 enterprise AI solutions in production and 134 digital employees. The magazine's 300-plus figure does not belong in the brief.

What BNY will put its name on

Nearly 50% of employees are building AI agents. Training is for engineers and for people without a technical background. The bank recorded 171,000 AI learning hours in 2025 across live bootcamps, curated pathways and personalised courses. Every analyst gets it in orientation.

"Digital employees" here means multi-agentic systems that run alongside humans, with personas and supervisors, not a chatbot in a lanyard. Payment processing is one of the jobs they name. The annual report does not give a minutes-to-seconds claim.

Microsoft's Work Lab write-up is the other primary I will use. The bootcamp is 40 paid hours. It started with 35 people in April 2025. Microsoft says it has graduated roughly 2,300, and sessions now run 800 strong. People join from London, Singapore, Pittsburgh and Pune. In November 2023 BNY was, on Microsoft's telling, the first major global bank to put Copilot out broadly. Roughly half the workforce is licensed.

Seema Phekoo, a managing director in legal at BNY, is the named operator I will keep. Legal was first to 100% on preliminary AI training. She helped roll out 500 Copilot licences and custom training in that function. If you want a practice to copy, start with the department everyone assumed would stall.

What this is not

It is not a ranking. It is not "the oldest bank is the most advanced." It is a United States firm with London and Singapore in the bootcamp zoom, spending real hours (171,000 in a year is not a lunch-and-learn) and putting agents in production under a platform they named Eliza.

The useful question for a chief human resources officer in our markets is whether you have a platform with a name, a bootcamp with hours, a function that went first and a number of production systems you would print in an annual report. If you have a Slack channel and a licence count, you are not in this photo.

We have been in rooms where the legal team is the last to get a login. BNY flipped that. Start the skills work on a real workflow and let the sceptical function go first. They will write your guardrails whether you invite them or not.

Two other numbers to keep in separate columns. Microsoft says sessions now run 800 strong, up from 35 in April 2025. That is a calendar that scaled. The annual report's 171,000 learning hours is a year of bootcamps and pathways, not a single town hall. Do not mash them into "BNY trained everyone overnight." Analysts get Copilot in orientation. Builders get 40 paid hours. Different jobs, different floors.

Singapore and London showing up on the bootcamp zoom is why this clears our geo gate even though the firm is American. If your regional CAIO cannot name who attends from Singapore or the United Kingdom, you do not have a global programme. You have a New York programme with a Teams link.

What this means for L&D

Eliza is a platform with a name, a menu of models and a governance story. That is heavier than "we bought Copilot." It is also how you avoid five teams buying five chat tools. The annual report still says 160 production solutions. Print that until they print a different number.

Forty paid hours. Not forty minutes. A named platform. A production count you would file. Legal first. Ignore the magazine's bigger number until the bank prints it.

Sources: BNY Annual Report 2025. Microsoft Work Lab. Forbes, 15 September 2026.