Today’s episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, the final one of Season 13, explores how Bank of America is preparing a massive global workforce for an AI future through upskilling and reskilling. Bernard Hampton, head of the financial institution’s Academy, explains how the learning and development organization focuses on workforce agility and a building combination of technical and soft skills.
Bernard outlines a three-level approach to adopting artificial intelligence and shares situations in which he feels humans need to stay in the loop.
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Transcript
Allison Ryder: What learning and development lessons can we take away from an organization upskilling hundreds of thousands of employees on the use of AI? Find out on today’s episode.
Bernard Hampton: I am Bernard Hampton from Bank of America, and you’re listening to Me, Myself, and AI.
Sam Ransbotham: Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I’m Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College. I’ve been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 12 seasons of podcast episodes. In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policy makers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.
Welcome back to Me, Myself, and AI. Today we’re joined by Bernard Hampton, head of The Academy at Bank of America. The Academy is one of the largest learning and onboarding organizations in corporate America, supporting more than 200,000 employees worldwide. Bernard has a central role in the bank’s effort to upskill, reskill, and prepare talent for the use of AI. Bernard, welcome to the show.
Bernard Hampton: Hey, Sam, thanks so much. [It’s] great to meet you.
Sam Ransbotham: I’m guessing most listeners are pretty familiar with Bank of America. It’s pretty huge. It’s one of the world’s largest financial institutions. I looked [this] up: 70 million clients, 35 countries. It’s huge, but I’m guessing most people may not be familiar with The Academy, which you lead. So can you tell us a little bit about The Academy and how that relates to Bank of America?
Bernard Hampton: Yes, certainly. The Academy [has] existed since 2017. It replaced our legacy learning organization, and it’s Bank of America’s award-winning onboarding education and professional development organization that’s really dedicated to the growth and success of teammates across the enterprise.
At The Academy, we’re laser-focused on workforce agility. By that, I mean it’s about building the right skills in the right roles faster, and we continuously process, improve, and look for opportunities for operational excellence or to bring in new technology or modalities, to be able to hit that mark. That’s really about the mobility, upskilling, and readiness of an AI enabled-workforce.
Sam Ransbotham: You know, we’re kind of the same. I teach a couple hundred students a year, and you’ve got 200,000. That’s about the same, right?
Bernard Hampton: Close.
Sam Ransbotham: The scale seems kind of staggering — the scale combined with the speed of change of everything going on. How do you manage those two things at the same time?
Bernard Hampton: Our academy pathways are really central to technical skills, data and AI literacy, client-facing excellence, leadership capabilities that scale. So at the end of the day, when we think about those shifting priorities across the organization for specific populations, we do a couple of things. Number one, we have an internal, traditional learning skills organization, but at the same time, we match that with subject matter expertise from the business. So within my organization over the last few years, some 750 people have moved from the line of business into The Academy and became a full-fledged Academy teammate, contributing that real-world intelligence to the organization.
Sam Ransbotham: That sounds good, and I like the idea, but it just seems really hard. I think about a year ago, everybody [felt they needed] to learn prompt engineering. And then RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] was the latest thing. Then it just feels like these topics are coming along so quickly. And actually, I could pick the topic of today, but we’re recording about a month before this broadcasts, so it’ll probably be old hat by then. How do you keep up with that? How do you design a process that can respond to that level of agility?
Bernard Hampton: AI certainly has created quite a bit of runway and opportunity for us. It shifted the learning priorities toward faster proficiency in core roles; better critical thinking and decision-making, as you can imagine; stronger communication and relationship skills; and then practical fluency in AI tied to daily work.
When we use AI-based learning modules, it’s not about saying, “Oh, we’re putting an AI tool in front of someone to help aid learning.” It’s thinking in real, practical ways about ultimately who do we serve, what are we trying to accomplish, and then work backward and determine the best solution that allows us at scale to be able to be practical, fact-based, help somebody focus on and develop core skills in a way that is psychologically safe but also engaging.
Sam Ransbotham: You mentioned things like communication skills at the same time you also mentioned AI technical skills. If you think about the spectrum from supersoft skills versus the more technical skills, where are your challenges? What are you having more trouble with? Or how do the challenges differ for each of those types of learning experiences?
Bernard Hampton: Ultimately, it’s been incredibly important that we keep both of them top of mind. I mean, it is easy today, and AI dominates most news cycles. It dominates what you read online. It’s the fun thing to talk about, when the reality is it is not like a toy — companies [that] treat that really seriously are going to start top-do
