We have to keep updating that for the way people use words, that process. But think 170 million phone calls, walks into branches, emails, et cetera, where that inquiry had — would have to go through another place and it’s able our clients to do things and find them. So we think that there’s vast promise for AI and we’re deploying it in places, a lot of internal stuff. We help employees work better, work faster. We’re doing it. We have it in our coding shop. There’s coders using it to continue to improve their effectiveness in learning it. But it’s still — there’s still the care that has to be taken on data and usage and models and accountability. It’s — all that stuff is still high. So we’re using for things that are a little easier and we think it has great promise.
It’s just going to — I’d say it’s going to be more similar to digital. What the pace will be, it’ll be a little bit of how far it can go before you start to run into difficulties, applying it effectively. But it plays off of the same thing that we’ve done in digital and Erica and other things. We brought Erica over to the commercial side now, so that — CashPro uses Erica to answer questions and we’re seeing the uses of that grow and you can see the customers can interface and be comfortable with it, and that’s good. So it will have tremendous help as it’s applied in more and more ways. We are still trying to hear and seeing if it really works, how much benefit it generates. Can it be controlled under the model outputs controlled, and also the things.
But we’ve had algorithmic machine learning type models all over our company for years. And so the billions we’ve spent literally over the last ten years on data — cleanliness data, or getting the data in the right place, making sure it’s dependable, and the models [operate or either under] (ph) that aren’t — these open at — open autonomous natural language models, but are models that are machine learning models. We’ve seen great promise. That’s partly how we operate the company now, basically on the same dollar amount of expenses we had in 2015 or ’16, to give you a sense. So yes, it’s been digitization, but it’s also been using more than that. So it’s got — we have high hopes for it. We just have to make sure it does a great job for the customer.
Gerard Cassidy: Very good. And as a follow-up, we’ve been reading and seeing a lot of information about the private credit markets making inroads, continue — and we know the shadow banking industry has been around for a long time, our entire careers. What are you guys seeing today? Is it more competitive against the Apollos and Blackstones in lending? And then second, they’re also, I’m assuming customers are yours, so how do you balance servicing them? But at the same time they could be a direct competitor in the lending markets.
Brian Moynihan: Well, that’s all the issues that we got to balance on a given day. And we can originate loans into their platforms and there are lots of things we can do. So we continue to work through that. I think to take it more broadly, my colleagues and I have made clear that the strictures around our industry, the methodology operating and the openness and ability to operate outside has led to the mortgage business largely being done outside the industry and most other asset classes for lack of better term. Being outside the industry and the private lending is just another case of that. And I think we’re very competitive. We do a great job. We have a $0.5 trillion of consumer, excuse me, commercial loans outstanding. We have hundreds of billions of dollars of mid-sized companies, et cetera.
So we think there’s a way that we can do this with our clients and help them and help us. A lot of them are asking can you help us originate loans? I think there’s still a question ahead of whether the policy of having more things going on the bank industry is a good policy. Of course, we in the banking industry don’t think it’s a good policy because the reality, I think, one inherent part of your question was when these companies bounce around because of economic stress or for them as an operator, the banking system has a workout methodology, not a liquidation methodology or trading methodology. And that served American enterprise very well. And so I think we have to be clear and see how it affects the economy that way. And those are issues that were true pre-pandemic and have become more acute.
So we feel we’ll be competitive no matter what. Nothing scares us. We’ve got a great team and they do a great job. But it’s endemic of the issue that if you keep pushing too much capital regulation, stuff will find its way outside the system. And that doesn’t mean the risk has changed, it just means it’s moved from purview of the regulators and that’s one of the points we make. But on the other hand, we are working with those enterprises to help us be a combined effective competitor.
Gerard Cassidy: Very good, Brian. I appreciate it.
Operator: This does conclude our question-and-answer session. I’d be happy to return the call to Mr. Brian Moynihan for closing comments.
Brian Moynihan: Happy New Year to everyone. Thank you for all the time today and on a very busy day with lots of us reporting. As we summarized, fourth quarter was a good quarter and another strong year for our company driven by organic growth from all our customer segments. Our digital capabilities continue to grow, our deposits and loans grew, and that’s good news. Our NII continues to exceed what we tell you each quarter in terms of what we think is going to happen, which is good news. We gave you new guidance which we plan to hit. Our capital markets activity remains good on both the investment banking side and the sales trading side. And importantly, to get the value of that revenue, we have to have good expense management.
You saw us, during the course of year take headcount down from 218,000 to 212,900. You saw us take the expense down sequentially, sets us up good for next year. And with all that, our capital and asset quality remains strong, as does our liquidity. So thank you and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.
Operator: This does conclude today’s Bank of America earnings announcement. You may now disconnect your lines, and everyone have a great day.
