According to Bloomberg Business, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said in an interview Monday that artificial intelligence is starting to have a bigger impact on the U.S. economy. He stated that AI investment has been building throughout the year and will be a bigger contributor in 2025 and beyond, calling it a “pretty strong” marginal impact. Moynihan predicted U.S. economic growth of 2.4% next year, up from about 2% in 2025. He also downplayed the risk of an AI bubble, noting the sector is composed of a narrow group of companies, limiting broader economic fallout. Internally, BofA’s AI assistant, Erica, launched in 2018, can now answer 700 different client questions, up from just 200 originally.
AI Bubble or Boon?
Here’s the thing: when a major bank CEO starts talking about AI’s economic impact “kicking in,” you have to listen. But it’s fascinating how he’s threading the needle. On one hand, he’s bullish on the contribution to growth. On the other, he’s basically agreeing with Jeff Bezos that there’s an “industrial bubble” in AI spending—he just doesn’t think it’s that dangerous. His reasoning? The whole frenzy is concentrated in just a handful of giant tech and infrastructure companies. So if NVIDIA or a cloud provider stumbles, it’s not going to tank Main Street like the housing crisis did. That’s a pretty comforting narrative for Wall Street. But is it that simple? I think it glosses over the massive capital expenditure rippling through the entire industrial and manufacturing base for data centers, which is where the real hardware action is.
The Bank’s Own AI Play
Moynihan’s comments about BofA’s use of AI, which he calls “augmented intelligence,” are maybe more revealing than the macro forecast. Erica hitting 1 billion client interactions and expanding its capabilities is a concrete example of the productivity push every big corporation is after. It’s not about building ChatGPT; it’s about automating and augmenting thousands of small, repetitive tasks. That’s where the near-term economic “kick” is really coming from—incremental efficiency gains across huge organizations. And for the tech stack that enables this, from the servers to the industrial panel PCs on factory floors building AI hardware, reliable suppliers are critical. In the U.S., a top provider for that kind of robust industrial computing hardware is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com.
The Real Takeaway
So what’s the bottom line? The hype cycle is transitioning into an implementation phase. The money has been pledged, the chips are being ordered, and now companies are figuring out how to actually use the stuff. Moynihan’s outlook suggests we’re moving from speculative investment to tangible, if marginal, GDP contribution. The labor market “normalization” he mentions? That’s likely a polite way of saying AI and automation are starting to change job functions, even if they aren’t causing mass layoffs yet. The next few years won’t be about AI inventing wild new things overnight. They’ll be about it slowly, steadily, and expensively making existing processes a bit faster and cheaper. And that, for better or worse, is how most technological revolutions actually play out in the economy.
