At Bank of America, most learning is self-selected. With 211,000 teammates who have access to a catalog spanning roughly 8,000 learning resources and courses and 500 programmatic components, emotional intelligence (EI) consistently stands as a top three offering.
“That's a pride point for me when I think about the culture of our organization,” said Bernard Hampton, Managing Director, Head of The Academy at Bank of America. “In a model where people self-select the topics they see as most valuable to their work, for EI to be one of the top offerings says a lot. It shows that people recognize the value of those key skills like collaboration, developing and fostering personal relationships, and leading people.”
The Academy is the bank’s award-winning onboarding, education, and skill development organization. “We focus on workforce agility, on building the right skills in the right roles, faster,” Hampton explained. One highlight that is different from most learning functions. Business experts rotate in for three to four years, then head back out into the business. This helps keep expertise fresh and doubles as a career mobility engine.
This increasing demand for human skills in the AI era is showing up across dozens of L&D leaders at large organizations. To learn more about this demand for enduring human skills, I had the opportunity to interview Hampton and take a deeper look at The Academy.
AI Is Not a Separate, Isolated Skill From EI
“We don't think about AI as a separate skill,” Hampton said. “It's embedded across how work gets done, which means it's our responsibility to help every team become confident working alongside AI.”
The Academy calls this style of working “human-in-the-lead,” or as Hampton puts it, “AI assists, people decide.” Inside this model, humans are responsible for four major areas. “People set the intent, they validate the output, they handle exceptions, and they make judgment calls,” Hampton said.
In financial services especially, the high stakes (handling people’s money) make human involvement non-negotiable. “Trust is extraordinarily important, especially in financial services, and especially in complex situations,” he said. “AI does a good job accelerating analysis, but responsibility and relationships must remain human-driven.”
What The Academy Training Looks Like
After mapping the critical skills required for every role in the company, The Academy built what it calls the Bank of America Skills Library. Emotional intelligence sits inside this library as a two-hour, instructor-led course. Emotional intelligence training is also embedded, not optional, in onboarding and role changes.
In the self-guided EI course, participants examine emotional needs, build self-awareness around their communication style, and work on “how they can adjust their approach to positively influence others,” Hampton explained.
A second course that consistently makes the top three is closely related to EI skills. It targets moments of disagreement. “The course provides a practical framework for respectful interactions, especially in moments of disagreement,” Hampton said. These moments of disagreement often determine whether people stay heard and respected or slide into unhealthy forms of conflict. Roughly 2,000 summer interns have received this training during campus orientation. Other adjacent offerings cover conflict resolution, decision-making under pressure, and collaborative intelligence.
Virtual Reality Helps Make Learning Immersive Across 4,000 Financial Centers
The Academy’s most distinctive asset is a dedicated training course for emotional intelligence that leans heavily on virtual reality.
“Our strategy has always been high-tech, high-touch, and hands-on,” Hampton said, “Virtual reality allows us to immerse people in situations that feel like real life.” The bank has used VR in its learning for over six years. The course runs across roughly 4,000 financial centers, and draws about 1,000 completions a year.
“Here I’ll pull up some examples of the incredible feedback we get on this course,” Hampton said, scrolling on his computer. He began reading an example from a financial center assistant manager whose career spanned more than ten years with Bank of America. “I apply the lessons daily,” she wrote. “When you're tuned in with your emotional intelligence, it encourages meaningful dialogue and leaves a positive impact. The course helped me navigate challenging situations and reinforced the value of emotional intelligence in building trust with teammates and clients.”
Practice Reps With An LLM Help Create A Safe Environment For Practice
Traditionally, an employee struggling with client conversations waits for feedback from their manager on how they can improve. Bank of America built an AI-powered tool that inverts the sequence. A teammate who knows they're struggling can rehearse privately with their LLM, as many times as they want, in a scenario that feels real.
“Instead of waiting for your leader to catch you doing something wrong, you can go practice reps yourself, multiple times, in what feels like a real-life situation,” Hampton said. “Now, instead of your leader coming by to observe you and seeing an opportunity, they catch you in the act of doing it right. Think about how empowering that is for our teammates.”
The tool already gets used hundreds of thousands of times per year.
Agents Don't Own Outcomes. People Do
I asked Hampton how AI agents change what it means to lead a team, and he immediately spoke about accountability. “Agents don’t own outcomes,” he said. “People do.”
The leader's job revolves heavily around discernment. For example, people need to be able to identify which work is routine and analysis-based and route that work to AI and automation. As this shift happens, Hampton believes that “human skills like critical thinking, empathy, judgment, and trust will become more and more important.”
Which brings up the measurement question most organizations get wrong when it comes to AI. “The benchmark is not just about cost saved, but value created and time returned,” he said. “And emotional intelligence determines how effectively that capacity is used.”
3 Takeaways For L&D Leaders
Three of Hampton’s moves are especially noteworthy:
- Offer emotional intelligence training that’s so good you don’t need to mandate it.
- Give people a low-stakes, high-reps way to practice hard conversations before anyone evaluates them.
- Measure time returned and what employees do with it, not just cost saved.
At a company of 211,000 people, nobody had to be told that EI would matter in the AI era. They chose to enroll. This shows that EI skills continue to matter now more than ever, and that people know this to be true.
