CX Decoded Podcast
September 1, 2026
SEASON 5, EPISODE 15
Jorge Camargo, Head of Digital Platforms at Bank of America, joins CX Decoded to discuss the eight-year evolution of Erica, the bank's AI assistant — covering scale, personalization, compliance and what's next as generative AI reshapes client expectations.
Inside Our Conversation
The Gist
- Erica isn't new — it's seasoned. Bank of America began building the AI assistant roughly a decade ago, years before generative AI entered the mainstream conversation.
- Scale runs through operations, not just launch. Nearly 90,000 incremental improvements have kept Erica evolving since its 2018 debut.
- Personalization beats the "average" client. Jorge Camargo explains why Bank of America builds for individual customization rather than a single client persona.
- Risk and compliance are co-designers, not gatekeepers. Camargo describes embedding legal and regulatory partners into projects from Day 1.
When Jorge Camargo talks about Bank of America's AI assistant Erica turning 8 this year, he's quick to note the real timeline runs even longer. "It's been probably 10 years since we started first conceiving of and developing Erica for the first time," the bank's Head of Digital Platforms told me CX Decoded.
That head start shows up in the numbers: roughly 40 million clients and more than 3.2 billion interactions since Erica's 2018 launch — about 2 million conversations a day. But Camargo said the more revealing metric is what happens behind the scenes: nearly 90,000 incremental improvements made by the bank's data science team, from typo fixes to full journey rebuilds.
Much of that discipline traces back to a philosophy Camargo returns to often — that there's no such thing as an average customer. He cited the story of a 1950s Air Force lieutenant who discovered that cockpits built for the "average" pilot fit no one at all, a lesson Camargo applies directly to digital banking design. "There is no such thing as an average customer," he said. "We always have to build in the customizations."
That principle extends to how Bank of America blends automation with human support — what Camargo calls a "high tech, high touch" approach — and to how compliance gets built into projects. Legal and risk partners, he said, are "co-designing with you from day one," not signing off after the fact.
Looking ahead, Camargo said the team's priorities remain twofold: sharpening Erica's intelligence and expanding where clients can reach it, as digital touchpoints now make up roughly 94% of all client interactions with the bank.