BNY has built tools to track how much it spends on artificial intelligence and to route each task to the model best suited for it, Chief Financial Officer Dermot McDonogh told Bloomberg Television. The goal is to avoid overspending as AI bills rise across the industry.

“We’ve become quite disciplined and developed some sophisticated telemetry so we can track how we’re spending and how we’re using our tokens,” McDonogh said.

Tokens are the units AI models process, and they are the basis for most AI pricing. McDonogh said the bank will rely more on sending tasks to the right model “over time as costs come into play.” The logic is simple, he said. “We don’t use expensive models for cheap queries.”

The bank runs about 400 AI agents. AI is only part of its $4 billion annual technology budget, according to McDonogh. BNY uses models from the big cloud providers and is not tied to any one of them, he said. That holds even though BNY Chief Executive Robin Vince joined OpenAI’s board in July.

The shift in tone is notable. In July, McDonogh told Fortune that the bank did not track token use and focused on results instead. “It’s not something we spend any time talking about,” he said at the time.

Now he says the bank is watching costs closely, though he is careful about how he frames it. He does not want cost controls to slow AI adoption. “We don’t talk about it in relation to efficiency or job cuts,” he said. “We talk about it in relation to upskilling and trying to do better things.”

The pressure he describes is spreading. Companies are paying more for AI even as the price per token drops, because AI agents consume far more tokens than earlier tools did. In June, the chief executive of Commonwealth Bank of Australia warned of rising AI bills. In July, Atlassian put its engineers on monthly AI budgets.

Other banks have been more open about the workforce side of AI. Citi Chief Executive Jane Fraser said in July that AI-related job losses had already started at the bank. BNY has taken a different public stance, with McDonogh saying the bank talks about AI in terms of training employees rather than cutting roles.

Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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