Bank of America has begun using its virtual assistant, Erica, to support employees in commercial banking and wealth investment, the head of Erica revealed to Bank Automation News on Wednesday.

Erica was originally developed in June 2018 as an assistant powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for its Bank of America app, but the $2.2 trillion bank continues to evolve its use cases, said Christian Kitchell, head of AI solutions and the Erica group. The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank now deploys Erica more broadly across the bank, most recently in commercial banking.

“We’re going to continue propagating across the agent and client side, so right now Erica is actually serving as an assistant to our commercial banking,” Kitchell told BAN. “We want to bring that intelligence, those capabilities, to bear in terms of enriching the entire user experience.”

Erica also is powering help and search in the investment space, a move that the bank started at the end of last year, Kitchell said. For example, Erica can connect a customer with excess capital or questions about their portfolio with a specialist, acting as a liaison to help the agent assist the customer. Erica is also embedded in Life Plan, the bank’s automated personal finance tool that launched in October. Last fall, Bank of America leveraged Erica in live chat as well.

The virtual assistant handled 100 million interactions and hit 20 million total users in the last quarter, Kitchell said. Users are measured as active mobile user customers who ask a question and complete a request, he noted, adding that it took 18 months to complete 100 million transactions after the assistant first launched.

However, Erica’s development over the past three years has not been without its challenges. Integrating data sources continues to be a problem for Bank of America, which has many back-end systems, data structures and platforms as part of its IT systems, Kitchell said.

“Obviously, it’s an ongoing challenge in the fact that Erica touches virtually every part of the organization, from traditional bank accounts to card loans, investing, planning, and now starting to move into the wealth-management space,” Kitchell said. “It’s an awful lot to ensure continuity across, but it’s an area that we’ve had a lot of success.”