BMO
“ WE WANTED TO START BUILDING THE CREATIVITY MUSCLE IN OUR EMPLOYEES, BECAUSE THIS IS A NEW WAY TO WORK”
Kristin Milchanowski Chief AI and Quantum Officer BMO
Kristin states that clarity of purpose is what brings people on board:“ That’ s the first secret: really determining what business value you’ re going to generate from this technology. It makes it personal, and that leadership moment is needed to go from pilot to scaling.”
Her advice is to think ambitiously but act incrementally:“ It’ s not that you go big out of the gate. Dream big, but then you start small, so you break it down into incremental steps.”
Building workforce confidence in AI That same incremental mindset underpins how BMO has approached bringing its own workforce along for the technological ride.
In fact, the organisation’ s approach to change management earned it joint recognition for the best AI training programme among banks, awarded by Evident AI, which benchmarks AI maturity across the financial sector.
Central to that effort was an early decision to give every employee access to Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant built into Microsoft’ s productivity software. Rather than rolling the tool out to select teams first, BMO chose to distribute it across the entire workforce from the outset.
“ We weren’ t going to leave anyone out,” Kristin goes on.“ The premise is that we wanted to start building the creativity muscle in our employees, because this is a new way to work.” Kristin believes two groups are thriving with AI: those who are deeply technical and those who are simply curious. Both, she has found, perform equally well with the new tools, reshaping how she thinks about talent.
“ I can take one of my deep tech experts and put them next to somebody who is just really curious, and they’ re both equally doing really well with this new technology,” celebrates Kristin.
Having built the necessary foundations, BMO is now giving employees more focused direction:“ We’ re not just letting them randomly be creative and curious; we’ re giving them far more specific guidance – or, in some cases, they’ re figuring it out themselves.”
10 bmo. com