RBC’s new AI chief says data will set winners apart

https://thelogic.co/news/rbc-ai-chief-data-scaling/

Publish Date: 2026-03-23 06:45:00

As artificial intelligence reshapes the Canadian banking industry, Royal Bank of Canada’s newly appointed head of AI describes it as a “generational technology” driving a broader shift—one the bank is racing to lead. But he also acknowledges that many of the fears surrounding AI are, in fact, legitimate.

Bruce Ross spent more than a decade as RBC’s head of technology before taking on the new role in February. The AI group he now leads—reporting directly to CEO Dave McKay—folds in Borealis, the bank’s in-house research lab founded in 2016, which helped position the lender as an early player in the machine learning field.

Talking Points

During its investor day in March 2025, RBC CEO Dave McKay said the bank expects to generate between $700 million and $1 billion in enterprise value by 2027 from AI

According to London-based Evident’s 2025 report on the state of AI in banking, three of Canada’s Big Six banks rank among the top 10 globally for the number of AI researchers hired

That’s helped place RBC among global front-runners. According to AI benchmarking and intelligence platform Evident’s 2025 State of AI Research in Banking report, RBC is Canada’s highest-scoring bank for AI maturity in its index of 50 international banks, and ranks third globally. But three of Canada’s Big Six banks also sit among the top 10 globally for the number of AI researchers, with TD Bank employing roughly 100 researchers—about double RBC’s count.

Ross said banks’ real edge in the AI race won’t come from access to the same tools, but rather from the data they feed into them.

“One bank might have the Humber River, we’ve got the St. Lawrence,” Ross said in an interview with The Logic, referring to the scale of proprietary data flowing through RBC’s systems. With millions of clients across…

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