Technology dazzles, but empathy helps make AI an organizational success 

Kristin L. Milchanowski addresses the audience at Summerfest TECH.

Business leaders face a flurry of new challenges as the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools reaches breakneck speed—but a top expert cautions that technological embrace must include empathy.

“Innovation without empathy is just efficiency without trust,” said Kristin L. Milchanowski, chief AI and quantum officer at BMO Financial Group and author of “Return on Intelligence: A Strategic Enterprise Playbook for Scalable AI Agents.”

Milchanowski told an audience at Summerfest Tech in Milwaukee that technology is the easy part of this workplace transition, while exercising leadership principles is the harder component.

“The best way to have technology take root and take hold is that people see themselves in it, and that’s a fundamental principle for most anything in life,” she said.

When it comes to AI agents—that is, autonomous software systems that employ AI to accomplish specific tasks—Milchanowski aims to create and deploy “craveable” agents at BMO.

“I want my team to be eager to lean into the agenda,” she said. “Part of it is … making something they crave, that they want to come to the table to use.”

Focus on the value added

As companies dive deeper into AI, Milchanowski said they need to have conversations about how to use AI to expand their return on investment and create value-added tools.

“It’s really about getting it embedded into your infrastructure so that every decision you make is drawing on those benefits of the intelligence they have access to; the value added, the differentiation for your company,” she said.

Milchanowski said that when BMO embarks on a new AI project, it is always in cooperation with chief operating officers and chief financial officers. She said that leadership-wide buy-in and thorough analysis is critical.

“They’re ping-ponging and doing a little bit here and a little bit there,” she added. “I want to create business value for my teammates and my clients.”

Keep core values in mind

Recognizing that AI agents are a way to influence organizational change—and not just achieve small victories—is also central to tapping into the technology’s benefits.

“The absolute real trick to all of this is not getting two plus two faster or getting two plus two in a unique way,” she said. “It’s taking all of that insight from your data, from the AI, embedding it into your organization as a layer of intelligence—and then you can operate in new ways, and that’s the flip. … So that you can leverage that intelligence over and over again.”

BMO also publishes its Responsible AI framework , ensuring that every step of deploying AI agents aligns with trust, transparency, and business value. To help ensure that, Milchanowksi said that every agent that BMO deploys carries with it a digital report card that shows who made it, for what purpose, its performance metrics, and whether its performance degrades over time.

The financial firm has also established the BMO Institute for Applied AI and Quantum, in preparation for the coming generation of quantum computing that will add new, far more sophisticated dimensions to data .

“It seems daunting and scary, and we’re just trying to engage a lot of conversation,” she said. “We’re doing our research on the next best things. … There’s a real benefit coming.”

As companies work to build AI into their cultures and business infrastructures, Milchanowski urged leaders to keep an eye on the human elements and connections that made their firms successful in the first place.

“One of the things I remind our BMO team is that our relationships with each other and our relationships with our clients are going to differentiate us in five years’ time, and it’s not the technology that’s going to differentiate us,” she said. “Maintaining human connectivity is absolutely vital.”