Bank of America’s big bet on AI started small

Gopalkrishnan, who is the CIO of six of the bank’s eight lines of business, says Bank of America operates a hybrid “hosting strategy” based on a virtual private cloud the bank has operated for years and public clouds as needed. BofA has relationships with Microsoft, AWS, Google, and other clouds, but like many bank CIOs, Gopalkrishnan prefers to keep workloads close for cost and security reasons.

“We have been very effective at scaling it, which lets us get to a point where we’re not paying for bursty volumes,” Gopalkrishnan says, adding it has been “interesting” to see repatriation efforts of some organizations away from cloud computing.

“We’ve always said we’re not going to over-index and over-swing the pendulum,” the CIO says. “Our view is we essentially have a hosting strategy. We’ve got multiple availability zones in our virtual private cloud. We extensively use our virtual private cloud, and as need be, we can burst into public clouds based on the use cases, either for other software providers or for ourselves.”