You may not know his name, but you know his brainchild’s name.

Christian Kitchell is the person responsible for the creation of Erica, the Bank of America virtual assistant that has been lauded by industry analysts as the leading example of AI chatbots in banking.

As head of AI solutions and the Erica group at the $2.6 trillion Bank of America, Kitchell oversees platform vision, strategy and operational management as it relates to AI, predictive analytics and natural language processing. Erica has notched 16 million users as of the third quarter and has evolved from answering simple FAQs to completing account-specific tasks and providing proactive insights.

“We want to deliver personalization at scale,” Kitchell told Bank Innovation. “Ultimately, what we want to do is be able to get to a universe of one, which is to say, every client will have a unique experience based on their situation, their needs, their relationship with us. And that’s where the insights really come in, and where we’re starting to evolve into our next phase of development.”

Kitchell spoke with Bank Innovation about what’s next for Erica, the most challenging aspect of the chatbot’s development and evolution, and a surprising fact about himself that his colleagues might never expect. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Innovation: What do you think is the main driver behind Erica’s success in the financial services industry?

Christian Kitchell: From the outset, we haven’t really looked at other FIs as our primary competition. From day one we have always said, ‘Look, if we’re going to play in this space, you want to be playing among the leaders.’ So we have always looked at big tech — whether it’s Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant — as our primary competition benchmark. I think starting with that kind of approach would be one good catalyst — setting that bar really high — and two, literally everything we do is driven by data and our clients.

When we were contemplating this endeavor, the first thing we did was get about 500 clients together and we asked them, ‘Where would this kind of solution be most valuable to you?’ And the top three things we heard were: help people with surprises, help people reduce debt and help people create a plan to balance the competing priorities in their life. Starting with that operational philosophy from the beginning was really valuable to us and got us off on the right foot.

BI: People say the key to virtual assistants is connecting the help with an action. How do you consider the workflow a customer goes through to ensure you’re supplying the most valuable and efficient solutions?

CK: We do start with the data, and one of the most valuable things we’ve found with Erica is she provides a real-time pulse of the client, which is to say Erica has effectively evolved as a gateway to service on the mobile app. We get to see what clients are asking, how they’re asking it, and when they typically ask it on a real-time basis. As we think about new capabilities to bring to bear, how clients are trying to engage with our digital capabilities, and where we might have opportunities to enhance or improve that — that level of visibility into the platform itself and client behavior is invaluable. From a workflow perspective, it’s key to make sure you have that logical continuity.

Another piece that is hugely important, a decision we made out of the gate, is to offer a tri-modal means of interaction. Depending on what you’re trying to do, certain things are going to be more attuned to voice interaction, some things are going to be better served for text interaction, in some cases you’re going to get a lot more efficiency out of providing options on glass, so more of a traditional navigational scheme.

BI: You’ve mentioned data quite a bit. What has been the most challenging part about gathering the data, organizing it, analyzing it and contextualizing it throughout the bank’s systems, platforms and products?

CK: From an Erica perspective, by virtue of the fact that the company is so large, there has been a lot of assimilation of different technology, data pools, systems over the past, say 15, years by virtue of integrations, acquisitions, being able to connect all of the back-end systems so you can actually turn that information into insights when clients need it. That has been probably one of the biggest things we’ve had to overcome, and that was a big part of the foundational work that took place in 2017 and 2018.

There’s no easy way to do it. Honestly it’s just digging in and sort of knowing the wires to the source and knowing what you need to do from an API perspective to assimilate them. A good example of that is our bill-reminders capability, where we proactively let you know when you have bills coming due and what you’ve recently paid, what you might have scheduled to pay. We had to connect with over 26 back-end systems to make that function.

BI: What excites you the most about AI in financial services? What are some applications of AI in banking that are on the forefront that you’re currently exploring for Erica?

CK: As we get better at assimilating all these different data sources and conditional behaviors, that’s giving us the ability to create a much richer graph of every client. So where it used to be, you do targeted marketing, now we’re actually getting a much truer understanding of each individual from the bottom up. That’s when you can start to apply the AI, machine comprehension, deep learning capabilities, to have a true understanding of clients at a 1:1 level. And then you can create an experience that is really intuitive, really familiar, by virtue of the conversational capabilities and integrating the rich [user interface] — that’s where you’re largely approximating a human-to-human interaction for, admittedly, your oftentimes more straightforward tasks.

Now, if you really want to improve a client’s financial situation, that’s where I think it gets exciting for us, and that’s where we start going beyond where we extend Erica’s capabilities from banking into cards, loans, investing, even planning and wealth management. I would say that’s the future roadmap for us.

BI: What’s something your employees would be surprised to learn about you?

CK: I’m an avid fly fisherman and I travel around the globe chasing large fish in salt water with a fly rod. The biggest fish I’ve caught would probably be a 55-pound giant trevally.