BNY Eliza: Enterprise AI Platform

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The challenge was building one tool flexible enough to serve very different people at BNY, from Account Leads to Operations, Legal, Product, Engineering, and executive leadership, inside an institution safeguarding $55.8T in assets. It had to flex to each role's context, clients, and daily rhythm while pulling those teams closer together. Getting there took deep interviews, scenario and service mapping, and constant internal vetting, and that human feedback loop was everything. Our biggest win was helping BNY sharpen its own design and development process along the way.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
This was one of the most exciting shifts in how we work at Fantasy in over a decade. We started Eliza's design system with our usual process, then saw the real constraints BNY's design and engineering teams faced and pivoted to a fully composable system. Suddenly we could prototype and update in minutes instead of hours. We shipped a GitHub monorepo the team builds from directly in their IDE, instead of a Figma file to hand off. It changed the speed and scale a small design team could work at, and set a new bar across BNY.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
BNY's leadership is all-in on AI, and on Eliza specifically, with adoption a priority at every level. What began as a vision project has already run more than a year as an ongoing engagement, and given the partnership and how fast the technology moves, it will keep evolving quickly. In a short time it has reshaped how their design team works, and even how they hire, toward an AI-first approach. They are now exploring how to extend Eliza to include fully digital employees on BNY's roster.