• A personal injury lawyer apologized for filing court documents with fabricated quotations.
• The lawyer told the judge that he had begun using software from a venture-backed startup called Eve.
• The episode highlights a growing risk for the startups selling artificial intelligence to lawyers.

Lawyers keep getting burned by artificial intelligence that invents cases and makes up quotes. Now, some attorneys are naming the software they used.

Last month, a Louisiana personal injury lawyer apologized after submitting briefs that cited a real court decision but quoted passages that didn't exist. The mistakes appeared in two filings in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge and were flagged by opposing counsel.

"I'm trying to understand how I made this mistake," Ross LeBlanc, a partner at Dudley DeBosier, wrote in a private letter to Judge William Jorden on March 27. Earlier this year, he said, he began using an artificial intelligence program called Eve to draft pleadings. At first, he checked the citations often. "They were always correct when I checked them," he wrote.

That consistency gave him confidence, and eventually, he stopped checking, he said.

"I never thought this could happen to me," LeBlanc wrote, adding that he could not be sure whether the mistake involved Eve's software or if he copied and pasted something too hastily.

Jay Madheswaranm, Eve's chief executive, told Business Insider on Thursday that after a close audit of the case with Dudley DeBosier, the company confirmed Eve "did not hallucinate any case citations in this matter," including any fabricated quotations.

Courts have slapped sanctions on attorneys for filing briefs with errors created by artificial intelligence — often called "hallucinations." Last week, Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the country's oldest and most elite law firms, apologized to a federal judge over a similar slip-up.

What's new here is the blame game. When an attorney names the tools involved, the companies behind the software are put in the spotlight and could face reputational repercussions.

Legal software companies like Harvey, Legora, and Eve have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can make lawyers faster — and offer firms a level of reliability that general-purpose tools can't match. If their software starts to embarrass customers in court, that trust erodes.

Damien Charlotin, a French researcher who tracks hallucinations in court filings, estimates that fewer than 10% of cases identify the software used. Many lawyers, he suspects, keep that part private because they're relying on free chatbots like ChatGPT or other off-the-shelf tools that may not be authorized for client work.

Last year, a Latham & Watkins lawyer defending Anthropic in a copyright lawsuit made headlines after citing an article that does not exist. The lawyer said the mistake stemmed from using Anthropic's own chatbot, Claude, which fabricated an article title and authors.

Eve builds software for plaintiff-side lawyers using large language models, helping them draft documents, map out medical histories, and send and respond to discovery requests. The company was valued at $1 billion after it raised a $103 million funding round about a year ago. Madheswaranm said Eve now processes more than 200,000 documents and other results a month — up around 100-fold from a year ago.

LeBlanc told the judge that he had been wary of the technology generally because of the "horror stories" about hallucinated case law. He said he was persuaded after Eve pitched the tool to his firm and assured attorneys it had safeguards to reduce errors. He believed the risk was limited as long as he conducted his own legal research and directed the software to rely only on approved sources.

Then, opposing counsel in the personal injury case pointed out his mistakes.

LeBlanc's apology surfaced this month in a separate case involving a trip-and-fall at a Lowe's store. The opposing counsel found hallucinations in a brief filed by Dudley DeBosier and included LeBlanc's letter in a request urging the court to expand its inquiry into possible sanctions.

Dudley DeBosier has filed a motion to strike opposing counsel's request because it says the cases are unrelated. The firm also indicated that a lawyer used Claude to help draft the brief in the Lowe's case.

It's a view widely shared across software companies and law firms that artificial intelligence can assist in research and drafting, but responsibility for the final product remains with the human who signs the filing.

Madheswaran said Eve makes that explicit in its contracts and onboarding with new customers. The software also includes features designed to catch errors before they reach a courtroom, though they don't always work. Some errors are harder to spot than others, he said. Confirming a case exists is easier than verifying a quote is exact.

As the legal profession races to adopt artificial intelligence, mistakes are more likely to be caught. Courts are getting wiser to the technology, and opposing counsel are adjusting their tactics. Instead of only attacking legal arguments, lawyers are scanning filings for errors that could undermine the other side's credibility.

Chad Dudley, a founding partner of Dudley DeBosier, a firm with about 40 attorneys, said it trains its lawyers to carefully review generated results and requires them to agree to use the technology responsibly.

For his part, LeBlanc said he hopes other lawyers learn from his mistake. He told Business Insider on Thursday that Eve helped him move faster under time pressure, but after the errors surfaced, he felt "sick to my stomach" and couldn't sleep.

"I'm responsible for checking everything, no matter what technology comes along," he said.

He doesn't blame Eve for the blunder. Still, he's setting the tool down for now.

"I feel like, given what happened," he said, "it's fair to have a cooling off period, you know, touch grass."

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• Around 600 Google employees urged CEO Sundar Pichai to reject classified Pentagon AI deals.
• They said they want to see AI benefit humanity, not be used for autonomous weapons or surveillance.
• Google and the Pentagon are in talks to use Gemini in classified settings, per a recent report.

Around 600 Google employees sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday, urging him not to let the company's AI technology be used by the US military for classified operations.

The letter, signed by employees in Google's DeepMind and Cloud divisions, cited a recent Information report that Google and the Pentagon were negotiating the use of Google's Gemini AI in classified settings.

"As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes," the employees wrote in the letter. "We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses."

"Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads," employees continued in the letter. "Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them."

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Google has not yet responded to the letter, said Jane Chung, the founder of Justice Speaks, a communications firm representing the workers. Bloomberg first reported on the letter.

Google has long faced internal pushback to its efforts to work with the US military. In 2018, it decided not to renew Project Maven, a Department of Defense contract to integrate AI into military operations, following pressure from hundreds of employees. Palantir later picked up the deal.

The same year, Google established a set of AI principles, including a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance. Last year, it updated those AI principles to remove wording around weapons and surveillance.

The company also secured new contracts with the Pentagon last year to use its AI and cloud products. In March, the company said it would provide the Pentagon with AI agents in a non-classified setting. It also told Google DeepMind employees during a January meeting that they should expect more of these types of deals.

In the letter, Google employees raised concerns that classified work would lead to a lack of oversight into how the company's technology is used.

"We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways," the employees wrote. "This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond."

Read the full letter below:

Dear Sundar,

We are Google employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the US Department of Defense. As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes. We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses.

Therefore, we ask you to refuse to make our AI systems available for classified workloads.

We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond. Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.

Making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google's reputation, business, and role in the world. At this very moment, the safety of our own workforce and critical infrastructure are under active threat. Human lives are already being lost and civil liberties put at risk at home and abroad from misuses of the technology we're playing a key role in building.

We know from our own history that our leaders can make the right choices, for ourselves and for the world, when the stakes are high.

Today, we call on you, Sundar, to act according to the values on which this company was built, and refuse classified workloads.

• Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
• They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.

The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.

Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.

Tech companies are using various methods to motivate staff to use AI, such as tying AI use to performance reviews and gamifying AI use with competitive leaderboards.

The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.

Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."

The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini, with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.

It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."

It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.

"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.

Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:

• Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)

  • 55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
  • 80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.

• Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)

  • Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.

• Creation Org H1 2026

  • 65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.

(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)

Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey

Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.

More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.

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• JPMorgan software developers say the bank is raising its expectations for AI use.
• Internal company communications reveal the bank's new AI targets.
• The updated objectives affect members of its global developer workforce.

JPMorgan Chase's message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.

Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan's intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank's software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI and "contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact."

One document authored by the bank's human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives "will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March," an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees' goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank's new objectives.

"Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team's overall efficiency targets," read one goal written by HR. "Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions."

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.

JPMorgan is among Wall Street's biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.

Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who's using certain AI tools, and who's not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic's Claude.

'Anxiety' among developers

The developers Business Insider spoke to said they've been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank's GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as "light," "heavy," or "non" users.

For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm's Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.

"There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," the longtime IT developer said. Those who don't use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an "expectation" that velocity and output should show "a noticeable increase" quarter over quarter.

Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.

New performance dimensions

The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers' success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it's streamlining some of the primary "dimensions" it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: "what you achieve" — business outcomes — and "how you achieve it," including adherence to the firm's behavioral principles.

According to screenshots from the bank's intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: "stand out" for those who exceed job standards, "achiever" for the majority of employees, and "needs improvement" for those who require "additional support" and have struggled to perform consistently.

Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across "all performance dimensions." One is "Data Fluency," noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive "adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work." "Rate of adoption" is cited as one measurement of the employee's impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.

The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm's long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.

"You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review," the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.

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• A large division within Meta Reality Labs is undergoing an overhaul to become fully "AI-native."
• The unit is now organized into "pods" made up of "AI builders" and "AI pod leads."
• This new push and the latest layoffs at Reality Labs are unrelated, Meta said.

Meta is rebranding some employees as "AI builders" and organizing them into AI-native "pods," according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.

The memo described an overhaul of roles, titles, and team structures across a 1,000-employee team within Meta's Reality Labs. It's part of a broader, aggressive push by Meta to adopt small teams and use AI.

The pilot program was announced last month within the Reality Labs team that builds developer tools. Everyone in the division will now have one of three titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, or AI Org Lead. That's to encourage a shift toward a flatter organization, a structure that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," the memo reads. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

When asked for comment, Meta referred Business Insider to comments earlier this year from Zuckerberg that 2026 is the year AI will begin to "dramatically change the way we work," with projects that once required large teams potentially handled by one, "very talented" person.

According to the memo, each pod consists of a small group of AI builders focused on specific outcomes, often working across disciplines. For example, engineers could take on design work, depending on the task. Some Meta employees have already begun referring to themselves as AI builders on LinkedIn, Business Insider previously reported.

These pods are led by Pod Leads, who oversee day-to-day operations. They are, in turn, overseen by Org Leads, who also manage performance reviews and oversee promotions — processes that will be supported by unspecified "AI systems."

The memo said that the overall team size will remain the same under the new structure.

Meta laid off hundreds of staff on Wednesday, and this cut affected staff in Reality Labs, among other teams. A Meta spokesperson said the reorganization is not related to the cuts.

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• Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
• The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
• Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.

Arm has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world's smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.

Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn't just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world's most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.

"The biggest reason we're doing this is that our partners have asked for it," Haas said Tuesday.

With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.

Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see "strong growth opportunities" for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company's outlook could be "too ambitious."

Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm

Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming "Hyperion" cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.

"If we met the performance, we couldn't get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn't get the performance," Janardhan said.

This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were "working 'round the clock" to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.

"I didn't even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project," Saab said onstage.

While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn't an Arm chip available to buy.

OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.

"That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute," Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.

Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.

The chip market is 'getting very crowded'

Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is "getting very crowded," Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave "limited" opportunity for Arm's new CPU, Arya wrote.

"Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM's smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies," Arya wrote.

That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.

The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia's core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm's AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.

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• Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark social media addiction trial.
• The case centered on a woman who said social media harmed her mental health from a young age.
• The case is viewed as a key test of how juries may see dozens of similar pending lawsuits.

Meta and Google were found negligent in a social media addiction trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday, potentially setting the stage for dozens of similar lawsuits that have been brought against Big Tech companies.

The case centered on a 20-year-old woman, identified as KGM, who said her use of social media from a young age was detrimental to her mental health and accused the companies of knowingly engineering their products to addict kids.

After nine days of deliberation, the jury found Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, negligent. In a 10-to-2 vote, the jury also ruled that the two companies knew their design was "dangerous" but failed to warn the plaintiffs.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $6 million. That's $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages.

The jury determined Meta was responsible for 70% of the harm, while YouTube was responsible for 30%. That means the total damages owed by Meta is $4.2 million, while YouTube owes $1.8 million.

The plaintiff's lead counsel, the Lanier Law Firm, called the verdict "a referendum" in a statement. "For years, social media companies have profited from targeting children while concealing their addictive and dangerous design features," the statement said.

Spokespeople for Meta and Google both said the companies disagreed with the verdicts and plan to appeal.

"Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," a Meta spokesperson said. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

"This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site," the Google spokesperson said.

The Los Angeles state court trial has been viewed as a bellwether, offering a key test of how juries may see similar personal injury lawsuits brought by over 2,000 individuals. Meta has said potential damages in certain cases could reach into the "high tens of billions of dollars."

TikTok and Snapchat were also defendants, but settled the lawsuit before the trial began.

Meta executives testified at the trial last month, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, drawing large crowds of media and concerned parents, including some involved in other social media addiction lawsuits. YouTube's VP of engineering, Cristos Goodrow, also testified.

The companies have argued that plaintiffs' struggles are due to myriad reasons and can't necessarily be linked to social media.

During Meta's closing argument at the Los Angeles trial, Paul Schmidt, one of the company's attorneys, said the plaintiff needed to prove that if Instagram were taken away from KGM, her "life would be meaningfully different."

"The evidence has shown just the opposite," Schmidt said.

In January, Meta warned investors that its mounting legal battles related to youth safety could "significantly impact" its 2026 financial results. Attorneys for more than 100,000 individual arbitration claimants have "sent mass arbitration demands relating to 'social media addiction'" since late 2024, the company said in a 2026 10-K, specifically noting the case in Los Angeles, as well as a separate case in New Mexico.

The New Mexico case, which occurred at the same time as the Los Angeles trial, addressed different legal and technical issues.

On Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million after a verdict came down in the state's lawsuit against the company about sexual exploitation.

Meta said it would appeal the case.

• BNY's CEO, Robin Vince, is all in on AI's role in steering the bank's future.
• Now, some managers oversee the bank's 140 digital employees, a form of agentic AI.
• We spoke to Vince and a BNY managing director about the program.

Despite its 240-year pedigree, BNY isn't showing its age.

Under CEO Robin Vince, who took the reins in 2022, the firm — founded by Alexander Hamilton — is aggressively embracing AI. Recently, it has begun entrusting some managers with oversight of a contingent of new workers who don't even require a chair: the digital employee.

"All digital employees report to a human manager," Vince said in an interview with Business Insider this month in Palm Beach.

These digital employees create a layered effect with the company's agentic products, in which a single entity coordinates the activities of multiple individual agents. The digital workforce is more than 140 agents strong, each one with roughly two dozen skills, give or take, comprising their suite of abilities.

And, just like humans, they're held accountable for their work — with performance reviews.

After executing a variety of tasks humans might find tedious, the digital employee presents it to "the human who's responsible for the process — 'I've just done three quarters of the work for you. And by the way, I did it in 10 minutes instead of what would have otherwise been two weeks," the CEO explained.

About 100 managers across the firm oversee digital employees, including Rachel Lewis, a managing director and a two-decade BNY veteran who now serves as head of AI enablement for operations. Appointed to the role this year, Lewis is now helping teams across the bank build and deploy digital employees within their day-to-day workflows.

"We're kind of transferring the mundane to the machines," she said, describing how the tools are taking over routine processes and shifting how work gets done.

Lewis told Business Insider she works closely with teams across BNY to help them develop their own digital employees — often starting with ideas that come directly from the people doing the work and turning them into tools over time.

"The person that came up with that idea actually gets the opportunity to build that digital employee," she said. As teams begin to incorporate them into their workflows, she added, the technology starts to feel less like software and more like part of the team. "It's just almost having a virtual teammate as part of your group."

170,000 hours of training

To prepare for the AI age, BNY implemented a massive 170,000-hour AI training program for its 48,000 staffers. "Everyone in the company has done two to three hours," he said. The goal was to turn employees into a new class of supervisors who managed, rather than competed with, the machine. "We're investing in our people, because I want them to be the unlockers and users of AI," Vince added.

Last week, he sent a memo to several thousand of the firm's senior leaders pointing to some of the firm's past efforts in AI and encouraging them to be proactive in continuing to incorporate it. "We have an obligation to our company to capture this opportunity," Vince wrote in the email, whose subject line was "Reimagining BNY."

"This is a fundamental leadership shift, not simply a capability shift," he added. "It will require each of us to lean in and role-model how to engage with AI and how to harness it to solve problems."

Speaking to Business Insider, Vince described his first personal deep dive into AI as a "summer project" that kicked off in 2023 and never ended.

It was sparked by a YouTube video he saw that broke down the functionality of Tesla's Autopilot 12. He watched as the car observed human behavior and applied what it saw to navigating a stop sign, rather than adhering to a few rigid lines of code. "It was very clear to me that the future of AI was going to be learning to make decisions," Vince said. He wanted to bring that same adaptive intelligence to the bank. "It was highly applicable to our businesses," he added, "and it would be able to be a very fundamental input to how we actually ran the company."

Expanding the digital workforce

While some of the earliest digital employees have applications focused on straightforward fixes like data repair and data capture, Lewis said the tools that have stood out most are those that make it easier for employees to build and refine their own digital employees.

Building a digital employee starts with observing how work is actually done. Teams record themselves completing tasks step by step, allowing the system to analyze different approaches and identify the most efficient way to perform the work. That output is then used to generate the instructions that guide a digital employee, which are refined over time as teams train the system on new variations of the task.

Lewis said that as digital employees become embedded in workflows, teams are also treating them more like members of the workforce. "There is a performance review," she said.

Managers evaluate how the systems perform by reviewing outputs, identifying where they skip tasks or "didn't perform as expected," and feeding that work back into the system to be retrained on new variations and edge cases.

"We're continuously monitoring them," she added. "Every week it gets a little bit better."

Even as it expands its digital workforce, Vince said there are no plans to cut back on human capital; these tools, he said, are meant to supercharge their workflow, but not take responsibilities out of their hands. "I speak to CEOs who say, 'We're going to downsize, massively, our campus program.'" Vince's reply? "Why would you do that?"

"We've got the opportunity to have young people who are pre-trained in AI, enthusiastic, and be able to add to our business in different ways," he said.

• Allison Sheehan ran a baking business while working in private wealth at Goldman Sachs.
• She left Goldman after she said the firm told her she couldn't keep her online brand.
• Now, she's using her Wall Street skills, like capital allocation, to scale her cake business.

This as-told-to is based on a conversation with Allison Sheehan, 26, a former analyst for private wealth at Goldman Sachs and student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, where she's building her baking brand, Alleycat. Business Insider has verified her roles at Goldman and her current school enrollment. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Baking cakes started out as a college hobby — I'd make them for my sorority sisters and, once word got out, the broader Dallas community. When I landed a job in operations at Goldman Sachs in Utah, I stopped baking entirely, though I still longed to build up my cake empire. I had no family, no friends, no nothing in Utah, and was focused on getting transferred to New York.

I eventually got a job in the wealth management unit in New York. It was a part operational, since I was opening accounts and managing money, but also client-facing, which I loved.

As soon as I got to New York, I restarted my baking social media accounts, which had around 500 followers at the time, and announced that I was back in business. Orders picked up, but I didn't have time for all of them, so I capped it at three cakes a week, creating a scarcity model. I sold out weekly for about 6 months before expanding to up to 10 cakes.

That's when I started struggling to fit everything in, but I was getting good traction, making cakes for companies and fashion houses, like Goop. A typical day meant waking up at 5 am to frost a cake, going to the gym, going to work, baking a cake, going to dinner with friends, and going to sleep. I spent all my spare moments invoicing clients or editing videos. In 2023, my friend's boyfriend said I should post under the handle "investment__baker," but I was careful not to mention anything about where I worked or my exact job.

I learned valuable skills at Goldman

Goldman's high-stakes hustle culture has helped me build the brand — I had to be responsive, communicative, and accurate, all skills I use now. I always quickly consolidate my notes and immediately flag any concerns to product developers or suppliers. On the communication front, I'm able to connect people across the supply chain, from technical food scientists to more creative-minded brand designers. And when it comes to accuracy, I'm precise about costs, even on volatile products like cocoa, and margins.

In wealth management, I learned a lot about capital allocation, helping clients balance their portfolios and plan for expenses. But I learned just as much from my own failures.

After I started taking on more orders, I rented a commercial kitchen on the Lower East Side to bake and teach workshops. It solved logistical problems but drained my bank account. Every penny I made from baking went toward rent, and I eventually had to return to my apartment. That was definitely not a good capital allocation strategy, since it almost left me broke.

Goldman gave me an ultimatum

At that point, I knew I needed to go all in on my business and decided to apply to business school. Studying for the GRE while working and running the business was unsustainable.

My health deteriorated, and I broke down at work, having a panic attack and sobbing to my very understanding VP. I went home to Wisconsin for two weeks, shut down all of my social media accounts, and brought my brand to an awful, screeching halt.

Six months later, I reopened the account, with 2,000 fewer followers and almost no DMs. The momentum came back quickly, though, until, boom: Goldman's compliance team called me in and asked me to delete all of my content or leave the firm. They said the word "investment" on my social handles alluded to my job, and I had to delete everything. After finishing my business school interviews a few months later, I un-archived all of the content, got called in again, and quit.

I couldn't waste the five years of time and energy I'd poured into this business.

Goldman is still helping me now

I've scaled back my custom cake business and am focused on building my consumer packaged goods products: dry cake mixes and frosting, like the kind you can scoop out of the jar. I've finished the formulation, secured suppliers, and gotten my nutritional label approved, but I'm still struggling to find a manufacturer.

Small brands have to convince manufacturers they're a worthwhile investment. From their perspective, why spend time onboarding a tiny Instagram baker who could easily fail?

That's where Goldman has come in. Beyond knowing how to build a nice deck and balance a budget, my background at such a prestigious firm lends me credibility. It comes up in conversations, and I'll include it in presentations, since I'm proud to have worked there. The firm is relevant to my online brand, too, since I still post as the investment baker and share investing advice.

I'm making a fraction of my Goldman salary, but I'm fundamentally a creative person. I couldn't spend my life behind a desk. When I started, my goal was to make a cake for a celebrity, which I've done multiple times, including for Brooke Shields. Now, I want to bring home baking back — and revolutionize the grocery aisles.

• Tejal Rives hoped adopting AI at work would help keep her safe from tech layoffs.
• However, she lost her job at Amazon during layoffs in October 2025.
• Rives was disheartened but was glad the experience taught her about AI.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tejal Rives, 35, who lives in Arizona. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In October 2025, I read a news article that Amazon was planning to cut jobs. I'd survived other layoffs, but this time my gut told me I'd be affected. Sure enough, not long after, I received an email that my position as a product marketer was being eliminated.

I was one of 14,000 people impacted, and even though I understood the decision wasn't personal, it was very disheartening. I thought up-skilling in AI would make me safer from layoffs, but even though it didn't, I still think professionals should focus on learning this one important AI skill: prompt engineering.

I thought working on AI could safeguard my job

At the time of the October layoffs, there was debate around whether AI was the reason.

The company was encouraging us to use AI at the time, but I don't think it took my job. I wrote descriptions for internal products at Amazon, and when I used AI to help, I'd need to ask it to rewrite its output without fluff words. It didn't sound like how people talk. Despite my ethical qualms, I used AI, but, in my opinion, it was nowhere close to replacing my role.

Before I was laid off, I helped build an internal site for Amazon using AI. I hadn't really coded before, but with a colleague's help, I learned how to vibe code with a lot of trial and error.

I thought using AI for this project and showcasing different skills would make me more valuable to the company, but in the end, it didn't keep me from being laid off.

Initially, I felt like I'd wasted time by learning something I likely wouldn't use again, but overall, I don't think my efforts were wasted. The most important thing the experience taught me was prompt engineering, the practice of asking AI the right questions. I want to be minimal with my use of AI for ethical reasons, including around the water resources needed to power data centers. Efficient prompt engineering helps me ask AI my question once, without needing to clarify three or more times.

I'd highly recommend that other professionals learn prompt engineering to up-skill themselves in the age of AI.

The workforce has shifted, and you're likely going to need to learn AI and use it at your job, regardless of your moral qualms. We need to up-skill to survive.

I have my own business, and use AI very rarely

My husband and I already agreed that if I were laid off, I'd focus on being the primary parent to our child as well as on my career coaching business, called Do My Resume LLC, which I was running on the side of my Amazon job. Before being laid off, I planned to eventually quit my job and focus on it full-time.

I didn't realize how burnt out I was after four years at Amazon, though, and it took me a while to pivot into working on my business. For roughly three weeks, I didn't touch my computer. I took up sewing and house-cleaning projects because I needed separation from my screen.

Now, my life is slower than it was at Amazon. I spend roughly four hours a day, six days a week, on the business, and spend the rest of my time taking care of the house and my family.

The business provides career coaching and résumé-writing services, but we don't use AI to write résumés, because it's humans who read them. Recently, I used AI to give me advice about starting a YouTube series for my business, so I will use this technology to help me flesh out ideas, but very rarely. I haven't vibe-coded since the project at Amazon.

My husband is the breadwinner, and we can survive on his income, but the business is bringing in some fun money for me.

I think people should prepare for layoffs in the age of AI

Being laid off helped me remember that, at the end of the day, your job and company shouldn't be your entire life. It shouldn't come before your well-being.

I wish I hadn't sacrificed time with my child to get projects done towards the end of my time at Amazon. I'm glad I'm no longer sacrificing that time.

I think there will be more layoffs that will be attributed to AI's efficiency, and professionals should always be prepared. Reskilling in the age of AI won't necessarily stop a company from laying you off, but it might help you land a role faster.

Amazon did not provide a statement in response to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Do you have a story to share about being laid off in 2026? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com

• Young tech startup founders are having a moment in the AI era.
• From teenagers to 20-somethings, these founders are raising millions.
• Take a look at the pitch decks some of these founders shared with Business Insider.

Tech is no stranger to young founders.

Steve Jobs was 21 when he cofounded Apple in 1976. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when Facebook launched. Whitney Wolfe Herd was 25 when she unveiled Bumble.

Many of today's startup founders are still young and scrappy. And in the age of AI, they're even more empowered to barrel ahead.

Some are following the footsteps of tech titans before them and dropping out of college. Others are opting out of the undergraduate experience altogether, with a few ditching high school to pursue careers in tech.

Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, founder of AI coding startup Nozomio, told Business Insider that he dropped out of high school in Kazakhstan after getting accepted into the competitive startup accelerator program, Y Combinator (YC). At the age of 18, he raised $6.2 million for Nozomio.

Rakhmetzhanov isn't the only teenager finding success in AI. There's also Toby Brown, a UK teen who raised $1 million for his AI project. There's also Zach Yadegari, the teenage cofounder of Cal AI, a nutrition app.

College-aged founders are also building companies and raising capital, such as the Yale students behind Series AI, a new social networking startup.

The median age for YC participants is now 24 years old, compared to 30 in 2022, YC's Pete Koomen told The New York Times in August.

Business Insider has interviewed the founders of 12 startups who are 25 years old or younger and have raised millions in funding since 2024 about the pitch decks they used to impress investors.

Read 12 pitch decks founders who are 25 years old or younger used to raise millions:

Note: Founders were 25 or younger when Business Insider published the following articles.

Series A

• Posh, an events platform, raised a $22 million Series A when its founders were 23. Read the 12-page pitch deck it used.
• Clyx, a startup trying to connect people via in-person events, raised a $14 million Series A when its founder was 25. Read 22 pages of its deck.

Seed

• Ditto, an AI dating startup founded by UC Berkeley dropouts, raised $9.2 million when the founders were 23 and 24. Read its 12-page pitch deck.
• Lyra, an AI video call startup, raised a $6 million seed out of YC when its founder was 23. Read the 8-slide pitch deck it used.
• Nexad, an AI adtech startup, raised a $6 million seed after wrapping up A16z's Speedrun accelerator. Nexad's CEO was 25. Read the 10-page pitch deck.
• Orange Slice, a YC-backed sales tech platform, raised $5.3 million when its founders were 23. Read the 7-page pitch deck.
• Golpo, a generative AI video startup, raised a $4.1 million seed out of YC when its founders — who are also brothers — were 19 and 20. Read its 7-page pitch deck.
• Bluejay, an AI agent startup, raised a $4 million seed coming out of YC when its founders were 23. Read its 9-page pitch deck.
• Novoflow, an agentic AI startup building tools for medical clinics, raised $3.1 million when its founders were 18 and 19. Read its pitch deck.
• CodeFour, an AI police tech startup, was founded by two 19-year-old MIT dropouts and raised $2.7 million coming out of YC. Read the pitch deck.
• Cerca, a dating app that connects people with mutual friends, raised a $1.6 million seed when its CEO was 23. Read the 10-slide deck.

Pre-seed

• Series, an AI social networking startup, raised a $3.1 million pre-seed when its founders were 21.

This story has been updated with additional examples.