About 45 minutes into Citi’s second-quarter earnings call, the bank’s chief financial officer mentioned another executive, Tim Ryan, by name when talking about the efficiency of AI.
Citi is banking on technology chief Ryan to help break through the era of outdated technology and regulatory oversight, in part through the use of AI. Ryan oversees the bank’s roughly $12 billion technology budget and said he is focused on making sure Citi’s more than 220,000 employees are actually using AI tools.
For Ryan, that doesn’t mean tracking every AI token an employee spends the bank’s money on, but rather striking the right balance between “metrics and pride.”
“What we quickly realized is that you can’t measure everything, because you’re suppressing it. You have to measure what’s important, but don’t try to measure every last-mile use case, because frankly if you feel like you’re being watched too much, you’re going to turn people off,” he told Business Insider in May.
Ryan said this philosophy reflects his belief that companies will win the AI race not by the technology they choose, but by how people use it.
“I don’t think anyone will stand up and say I won because I chose this LLM or that LLM,” Ryan said. “Whether they win or lose is how they bring tens of thousands of people together.”
The company has hundreds of AI use cases, and Fraser said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that nearly 90% of its employees were using AI tools. Ryan cited Citi’s 4,000-person peer-to-peer training program as an effective way to expand adoption, and said it’s focused in part on expanding the use of agents in coding.
Metrics are important, but they’re not everything
Unlike some of Citi’s peers, Ryan doesn’t believe that closely measuring employee usage of AI will help scale the technology. (JPMorgan has AI dashboards for individual engineers, and Goldman Sachs tracks team velocity.) Doing so risks making people feel like they’re being watched, he said.
“I don’t believe in life on the spectrum,” he said. “If you have all the metrics and no pride, it’s not sustainable, so that’s a problem. If you have all the pride and no metrics, it’s not sustainable.”
That doesn’t mean the City doesn’t keep track of its spending. The debate surrounding the cost of tokens is heated across the industry. Coinbase has weekly price caps. Walmart has restrictions on the use of internal tools. JPMorgan’s chief financial officer said token spending will become an increasingly important issue.
Ryan said Citi values ”big things” and encourages employees to use the lowest-cost model that meets their needs because “you don’t need a Ferrari to do some things.”
“What we can’t do is fall apart. That’s not great leadership,” he said. “We have well-established tools in place to track our spending, so we get ROI every time we do something big.”
Like the rest of the bank, Ryan is also downsizing his team. In 2024, Citi pledged to cut up to 20,000 jobs over three years as part of a sweeping “transformation” initiative. In its second-quarter results, Fraser said the bank’s workforce had fallen to 219,000.
Asked what he thought about headcount and AI, Ryan acknowledged widespread anxiety among engineers across the industry, but did not explicitly link the layoffs to the technology. He said he is focused on reducing the number of contract employees at the bank rather than full-time employees.
“What I can control is making sure we’re smart about hiring so we can ensure growth and minimize the number of pressure layoffs,” he said. “We’ve been incredibly open with our employees about that. It doesn’t eliminate the fear, but we try to reduce it and allow people to focus on what they can control.”