Bank of America doesn’t want employees to worry that its new virtual assistant, Erica, will change or eliminate their jobs. It wants them to prepare for that to happen.

Erica made its debut this year as one of Bank of America’s highest-profile efforts to use artificial intelligence. Responding either to speech or text commands, Erica helps customers perform basic banking tasks, like locking a missing debit card or finding routing numbers.

But while the virtual assistant—the first to be offered in a large U.S. lender’s app—is intended to bolster the customer experience, such innovations pose a threat to existing jobs. To help workers cope, Bank of America recently launched a set of online courses to train them for new and evolving roles in the company.

Changes coming

About three years ago, Chief Operations and Technology Officer Cathy Bessant realized that technological changes were fundamentally transforming the nearly 95,000 jobs in her unit, she says. Her division consists of staffers who build and run the digital tools that underpin the bank, as well as employees in call centers and loan processing. Some of those jobs will go away, Ms. Bessant says, while for others, new roles and responsibilities will emerge.

Across the banking industry, 1.2 million jobs are expected to be affected by AI technologies like Erica, according to a 2018 report by Autonomous Research. Such tools will allow many employees to do their jobs more efficiently, the report says. But thousands of others will find their roles eliminated.