How BMO turns human-centred AI into competitive advantage

By: Daniel Kitts

Can AI adoption succeed by putting humans first? 

One can be forgiven for thinking the answer is “no”.  But BMO, North America’s seventh-largest bank by assets, sees human-centred AI as not only possible, but as a competitive advantage – one that could give Canada’s AI ecosystem an edge over the “move fast and break things” ethos. 

“Winning with AI will not be determined by how many tasks are automated,” says Kristin Milchanowski, the bank’s Chief AI & Quantum Officer. “Organizations that most effectively leverage AI to augment human skills and improve client experiences will reap the greatest rewards from this technology.”  

The Vector Institute, to which BMO is a founding Platinum sponsor, couldn’t agree more. 

“From day one, Vector’s approach has always been about embedding ethics, fairness, and transparency into innovation,” says Glenda Crisp, the institute’s President and CEO. “That extends to our work with our industry partners.”

With support from Vector through research collaboration, engineering assistance, and talent development, BMO has developed award-winning platforms and breakthrough AI tools that help employees assess risk, quickly reference policies and procedures, and even monitor climate change and its effects on investments. Now, the bank is putting the lessons learned from these tools into a broader approach that measures and manages how people and AI interact.

These achievements have made BMO an internationally recognized AI leader in the banking sector. In October, it earned the joint number one global ranking in AI Talent Development on the 2025 Evident AI Index, a prestigious benchmark evaluating AI maturity across the world’s top 50 banks. BMO also moved up five spots in Evident’s overall ranking. 

“This ranking reflects our deep commitment to achieving tech excellence in a human-centric way that grows tech talent and builds a future-ready workforce,” Milchanowski says. “We’re not just advancing AI – we’re empowering our teams to shape the future of banking.”

Recognizing the central role new technologies will play in their business, BMO recently established the BMO Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence and Quantum, which will focus on the responsible innovation, application and governance of AI and the development of quantum capabilities. Milchanowski will serve as its Founding Director. 

From Research to Market Leadership

It’s one thing to say AI should augment human capabilities and enrich the human experience. But it’s another to turn rhetoric into reality.

In 2024, BMO Insurance began its roll-out of Rovr AI, a kind of personal digital assistant for life-insurance advisors doing field underwriting – the initial risk assessment and information-gathering stage when someone applies for a policy. 

Integrated with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, Rovr provides instant access to crucial and often complex data, such as an applicant’s medical history. This significantly reduces the time spent on risk assessments and avoids the danger of missing critical information during a manual document search. 

In 2025, the bank unveiled another AI product designed to transform the employee and client experience for the better. Lumi Assistant uses generative AI to give BMO frontline staff instant access to more than 8,000 personal and business banking policies, procedures, job aids, operations management guides, and standard operating procedures in both English and French. It also summarizes long documents and surfaces actionable guidance in real time and in plain language so employees can respond to client questions faster.

Even though Lumi was launched less than a year ago, it has already won “Best Use of Gen AI for Customer Experience – Canada” at the 2025 Digital Banker CX Awards and was named “Top Innovation in Finance – North America” by Global Finance’s Top Financial Innovations 2025.

“Rovr and Lumi don’t eliminate the need for a human team member to review the data and make a decision,” says BMO’s Milchanowski. “They simplify and streamline the often-complicated processes involved in banking and insurance. This gives our employees more time to build relationships with their clients and better address their needs.”

On top of Rovr and Lumi, there’s also SegMate, an AI toolkit developed by Vector in collaboration with BMO and telecom provider Telus. It applies state-of-the-art computer vision to satellite imagery to track deforestation, land-use, water bodies, and disaster response, allowing companies to understand how climate change may affect their investments in a much faster and more thorough way than traditional tracking methods. 

SegMate is open-source, which means any organization is welcome to use it to understand climate risks. 

“By sponsoring this open-source initiative that is available to all, BMO is not only helping its clients navigate the changing climate; it’s also helping others meet this challenge,” says Vector CEO Crisp. “That speaks to the Vector Institute and BMO’s shared commitment of developing AI responsibly and in a way that benefits all of society.”

“The responsible commercialization of AI is a competitive advantage,” says Milchanowski. “It helps us to think deliberately and strategically about how to best incorporate AI technologies into our organization, so that we are maximizing its effectiveness in our operations. It also helps us build stronger relationships with outside partners, our employees, and clients.”

Making sure AI puts humans first

After participating in Vector’s Managing AI Risk Initiative, BMO is now assembling its own approach, one that measures and manages how humans and AI interact.

The framework has three components: 

1. User Experience: Understanding how employees interact with AI, and whether they find these interactions helpful or frustrating.
2. Performance: Using touchpoint analysis to see where AI adds value to the work being carried out by employees, as well as outcome attribution scores to see if performance improvements are the result of humans, AI, or both.  
3. Trust and Responsibility: Measuring how well human-AI partnerships are working by designing metrics around how much control employees feel they have over AI and how often they override suggestions made by AI tools. 

“We are turning abstract concepts about AI into clear, specific actions, and holding ourselves accountable for outcomes,” BMO’s Milchanowski says. “We want to take a lead role in setting the financial industry’s standards for human-centred AI implementation. We encourage other organizations to join us.” 

“This framework is very much in keeping with Vector’s Trust and Safety Principles developed at the institute,” says Vector’s Crisp. “It’s wonderful to see BMO taking some of the ideas that underpin those principles and implementing them in a tangible way,” says Crisp. 

Building tomorrow’s AI workforce

Of course, if Canada is to turn human-centred AI into a competitive advantage, it needs humans with AI expertise. 

“The Vector Institute very much wants to serve as a catalyst for adoption of AI across industries,” says Crisp. “And we’re pleased that so many of our partners, including BMO, are involved in that effort.”  

At the heart of Vector’s talent development and retention efforts is its university outreach. Vector helps build AI programs, recognize AI-related master’s degrees, offer scholarships, and connect students to industry-ready roles. 

These efforts have paid measurable dividends. Since 2018, in Ontario, more than 2,500 Vector-affiliated master’s graduates have accepted jobs in the province after their studies. That translates to an in-province retention rate of more than 90 percent. 

Vector also holds an annual AI Summit and Career Fair as well as periodic bootcamps where partner organizations send employees to learn new AI skills and work through their own AI projects with hands-on support and advice from Vector experts. BMO has hired a number of people who came through these programs. The bank also sent teams of employees to recent bootcamps on Agentic AI, systems that can make decisions without human intervention, and Multimodal AI, or systems that can process multiple types of data like text, images, and video. 

“What’s useful about the university outreach and career fairs is being able to acquire new talent,” says BMO’s Milchanowski. “What’s useful about the bootcamps is being able to augment the knowledge and skills of the talent you already have.”

The bank also has its own enterprise-wide AI training program, AI for All, which includes a foundational training course to give every BMO employee a foundational understanding of AI; specialized learning tailored for all roles within the organization; a learning platform that saw a 222 per cent increase in AI-related learning engagement over the previous year; and innovation sprint events that invite employees to rapidly prototype AI-powered solutions to business challenges, with successful prototypes given funding for implementation. 

“The global competition for talent in the AI space is fierce, but when I look at what we’re doing here at Vector and the way that private-sector leaders such as BMO are doing in terms of training and hiring, I’m confident we’re producing the skilled workforce needed to drive Canada’s AI success,” says Crisp.  

A blueprint for national AI leadership

Looking ahead, Vector and BMO both see AI’s central role in the country’s economic competitiveness and support federal initiatives to develop the technology responsibly. These include Evan Solomon’s appointment as Canada’s first federal minister responsible for AI, and Ottawa’s AI commitments with the G7, whose leaders recently declared that AI should be developed in a human-centric way.  

“Decisive leadership from business and government will transform Canada’s research advantage into lasting competitive strength,” Crisp says. “We’re committed to continuing to work with BMO to ensure Canada’s AI ecosystem remains competitive and world-class while being responsible and human-centred at the same time.”  

“We want to lead by example when it comes to responsible AI adoption,” says BMO’s Milchanowski. “And in collaboration with outside partners including the Vector Institute, we’re achieving that.”