This Week in AI: Using AI to Mitigate Tariff Uncertainty and Bank of America’s Big Bet

Artificial intelligence continues to dominate headlines as businesses accelerate their digital transformations. From banking to AI models, here are the top stories PYMNTS published this week.

The ability of AI to make businesses more efficient is coming in handy as President Donald Trump’s back-and-forth on tariffs is making the markets swoon.

A Zilliant survey found that 83% of U.S. C-suite leaders are using AI to adapt their pricing strategies to economic volatility.

AI can help by monitoring and understanding tariffs in real time; finding new suppliers or sources for raw materials; improving scenario planning; raising worker productivity; and reducing costs.

Bank of America is allocating $4 billion toward new initiatives including AI in 2025, or nearly a third of its overall tech budget.

The financial services giant is seeing the benefits of using AI and machine learning, a journey it began in 2018 after launching an AI-powered virtual assistant called Erica to help consumers with financial matters. That’s four years before ChatGPT became a household name.

Gains across its business include a 50% reduction in calls to IT support after employees began using Erica for Employees, an internal AI chatbot. Developers were able to raise their efficiency by 20%. Employees save tens of thousands of hours per year by using AI to prepare materials ahead of client meetings, while sales and trading teams are more quickly and efficiently finding and summarizing Bank of America research and market commentary.

AI is becoming the equivalent of a corporate “pacemaker” as the technology helps enterprises manage their financial operations by automating and regulating billions of dollars in disbursements.

The result is that AI is becoming a profit center that helps businesses streamline their payment processes, ensure disbursements flow on time and in the right amount, and better manage their capital.

More than 80% of chief financial officers at large companies are either already using AI or considering adopting it for a core financial function, according to a forthcoming PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making.”

Salesforce is experiencing explosive growth in its data cloud platform, driven by enterprise demand for generative and agentic AI, technologies that rely on clean, unified, real-time data to be effective.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Gabrielle Tao, senior vice president of product management at Salesforce, said most companies struggle to unlock the full value of their scattered and siloed data.

Meta released its open-source Llama 4 models this week: Llama 4 Scout and Maverick.

They are the first multimodal models from Meta, meaning they can ingest images, not only text. Scout has a 10 million token context window (the amount of space for prompts). The previous record holder was Google’s Gemini 2.5, with 1 million and going up to 2 million.

Llama 4 is a challenge to proprietary models from OpenAI and Google.

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