Wells Fargo Turns to an AI Chief as the Bank Redraws Its Workforce and Structure

Banks are appointing dedicated artificial intelligence leaders at a pace not seen before. JPMorgan Chase has rolled out generative AI to almost all its employees, Citi is introducing agentic AI to roughly 40,000 developers, and Truist Financial named its own chief AI officer this week. Wells Fargo has now taken a similar step, elevating Saul Van Beurden to lead AI adoption across the company while restructuring its consumer businesses around him.

The San Francisco–based lender named Van Beurden co-CEO of a newly combined consumer banking and lending division and said he will also be responsible for expanding the deployment of AI tools across business lines. Charles Scharf said the new structure is intended to align how consumers use the bank’s services and to ensure business heads integrate new technologies into their operating models. “Success will be driven by business heads embracing these new technologies and rethinking their own operating models using generative and agentic AI solutions,” he said.

Expanding AI Inside One of the Country’s Largest Banks

Wells Fargo has steadily increased its AI investments over the past several years. In 2021, the bank began a partnership with Google Cloud. In 2022, it launched Fargo, a virtual assistant built on Google’s conversational AI platform. This year, Wells Fargo trained more than 90,000 employees on new AI systems and deployed AI tools to more than 180,000 desktops.

In August, the bank began rolling out generative and agentic AI to all 215,000 of its employees. The tools include AI agents that help bankers, marketers, customer relations teams, and corporate employees search documents and extract real-time insights. “Our employees and customers have powerful models in their hands. They expect the same at work,” Van Beurden told Forbes.