Saul Van Beurden, chief executive of Wells Fargo consumer and small business banking, has been tapped to scale AI at the bank, the lender said Thursday.
Additionally, the bank’s CEO for consumer lending, Kleber Santos, will take on added responsibilities as co-CEO of consumer lending and banking as Wells formally combines the businesses, allowing Van Beurden to focus more on AI.
“Generative and agentic AI will reshape competitive dynamics across every industry, and we are embracing these tools as we have embraced robotic process automation and machine learning for years,” Wells CEO Charlie Scharf said in a prepared statement.
In August, Wells gave branch bankers, investment bankers, customer relations and corporate teams access to AI agents and tools from Google Cloud. The tools help employees sort through massive loads of documentation and provide real-time market insights, among other things. Wells is among banks in a near-ubiquitous industry push toward AI-fueled efficiencies.
Wells has trained some 90,000 employees on AI this year, deployed AI tools to many others and is now broadening its uses, Scharf said.
“Our employees and customers have powerful models in their hands. They expect the same at work,” Van Beurden told Forbes this month on AI. “GenAI helps remove simple repetitive tasks, builds workflows and frees people to do higher-value work. We are scratching the surface.”
The key is to deploy AI in ways that “enhance human performance rather than replace it,” he told Forbes.
In his enhanced role, Van Beurden will help leaders in Wells’ businesses oversee transformation in their own segments, Scharf said in a prepared statement.
“Success will be driven by business heads embracing these new technologies and rethinking their own operating models using generative and agentic AI solutions,” Scharf said.
The advances in AI, he added, “have given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform how we work and we are excited by what we can deliver for our employees, customers and communities.”
Van Beurden joined Wells in 2019 from JPMorgan Chase, where he was chief information officer of consumer and community banking. The San Francisco-based bank elevated him in 2023 from head of technology to CEO of consumer and small-business banking.
A Wells spokesperson had no comment on the new appointments, or on AI adoption as a whole.
