AI in the C-suite: BNY CEO and OpenAI board member Robin Vince
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Photo collage: Madison Mills/Axios. Photo: Courtesy of Jennifer S. Altman
Robin Vince is CEO of America's oldest bank, BNY, which is also one of Wall Street's earliest AI adopters: It had over 100 "digital employees" in early 2025 before everyone else was using agents.
Why it matters: This is our first installment in a series on how executives use AI tools.
What follows is an edited version of our conversation:
Axios: On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being no AI usage and 10 being totally AI-pilled, where would you rank yourself?
Vince: "I'm probably a nine out of 10. I won't give myself a full score though, because one of the lessons for me in AI is that it's moving so quickly that actually being able to use it to its fullest extent feels like one of those quests you're never going to quite reach.
- "This feels to me like one of those lessons that is not unique to AI. We all have to be lifelong learners," Vince said, adding it's about "being OK with being a bit uncomfortable."
Can you take me into an example of a recent instance where AI surprised you?
- For a firm with 46,000 employees, "there's no person who can see the picture as completely, and so now to have AI be able to see a picture that you otherwise couldn't have seen and make recommendations in terms of what you'd actually do? That's a very significant thing."
- AI's "ability to see through all of these threads and hold them concurrently" to make suggestions is game-changing, Vince said.
- For example, Eliza, BNY's in-house AI platform, is "connected to our 360 feedback process" so if an employee gets feedback that they aren't responding to emails quickly enough, for example, "Eliza will then put extra emphasis on that" as part of coaching it provides employees daily.
Take me into a day in your life of AI usage.
- "This is where I humble myself because I'm sure that my usage of it is like 5% of what it could be if I was operating perfectly. ... [Eliza] understands my calendar. It understands my emails. It understands my documents, and so it coaches me at the beginning of the day, with how I should approach my day proactively."
- "So this morning I open up the Eliza Daily Planner, and it's starting to give me advice about you should use this bit in your calendar to prep for this other meeting, or there's this email that's been lost in your email box, which Eliza thinks is important that you haven't done anything with."
I have one minute left in our interview to try and break some news with you, since you were just added to OpenAI's board. Thoughts on IPO? Advice for them as a public company CEO?
- "I've been on the board for all of two weeks, so I won't break any news. But for me ... being the chairman and the CEO of America's oldest bank, and then to see ... sort of the polar opposite of a very new company that's moving incredibly quickly at the intersection of one of the most important topics of our time ... what a privilege."
- "As they're going through evolution as a company, getting bigger ... being able to bring a little bit of perspective from things that I've had as experiences, hopefully, it's a good two-way street."
1 fun thing: As we're speaking, Vince pulls up the Eliza app, which he would usually use to prep for client meetings, but to show me an example in real time he asks it to prep him for an interview with Axios reporter Madison Mills.
- The app selects which model it thinks is ideal for answering the query.
- It also takes into consideration the Axios Smart Brevity writing style as part of his prep.
