Milos Maricic: listen for the AI number on next week’s bank calls

On September 14, at a Barclays conference, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan put a number on the bank’s AI program: 130 to 140 projects in place “at a cost of $400 million, generating a benefit of $800 million.” The bank has never given a dollar figure like that on an earnings call.

On October 14 it reports third-quarter results, its first call since Moynihan spoke.

Will the $800 million make it onto the call? I wouldn’t bet on it.

My team went through 919 earnings calls of 60 major U.S.-listed financial firms since January 2023.

One firm put a specific dollar figure on what AI had saved or earned it: S&P Global, about $9 million a year from its Kensho Scribe tool.

Analysts asked for such a number 29 times and never got one.

Among 100 major U.S. companies outside tech, communications and finance, only FedEx has done so on a call, crediting “a new AI image capture process” with a surcharge benefit of “over $180 million annualized.” That makes two companies in 160.

“We don’t have the full confidence to put information out publicly,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told the analyst Mike Mayo in January.

In June 2025, at a Morgan Stanley conference, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said , “we do know we get benefits around $2 billion to pay for the $2 billion.” JPMorgan has not said that figure on any of its 13 earnings calls since mid-2023, and in October 2025 its CFO, Jeremy Barnum, told analysts that proving AI savings “turns out to be a very hard thing to do, hard to prove.” None of this makes me skeptical about the eventual gains from AI investment for financial institutions and across the economy.

AI is an all-transforming technology that will benefit most organizations at some point.

There are three related matters that do make me skeptical, though.

The first is the calendar .

AI investment will pay off on what economists call the productivity J-curve.

A bank that cannot yet put an AI number on its call is where the curve says it should be.