The Credential

A two-hundred-and-forty-year-old bank gave one hundred and thirty AI agents their own login credentials, email accounts, and human managers. The world's largest custodian just answered the agent identity question. The industry data says almost nobody else has. BNY Mellon — the world's largest custodian bank, responsible for more than fifty trillion dollars in assets under custody — has deployed over one hundred and thirty autonomous AI agents as what it calls Digital Employees. Each one has its own system login credentials. Each one is assigned to a specific team. Each one reports to a human manager. Each one is being given its own email account and, eventually, access to Microsoft Teams so it can contact colleagues directly. The agents run on BNY's Eliza platform, named after Eliza Hamilton. The platform is model-agnostic — agents switch between GPT-4 for complex reasoning, Google's Gemini Enterprise for multimodal research, and specialized Llama-based models for internal code tasks.