NEW YORK, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence is

expected to show big gains in productivity at banks, panelists

said at the Reuters Next conference in New York, but it has so

far been harder to make money from the technology.

Major banks have been applying AI to virtual assistants for

clients and introduced tools for employees to use for human

resources, risk, compliance and finance as well as trying to

develop products within wealth management.

Goldman Sachs ( GS ) Chief Executive David Solomon told the

Reuters Conference on Tuesday that deploying machine learning

and AI could improve productivity in areas including coding.

"We have 11,000 engineers. We do an enormous amount of

coding," Solomon said. "If we can increase with these tools

their coding productivity by 20 or 30%, it's a huge tailwind for

us."

Fellow U.S. bank BNY is also investing in AI tools,

CEO Robin Vince told the conference.

"We have thousands of people at BNY who are now enabled to

be able to build and commission agents to be able to help them

with their daily tasks," Vince said.

However, AI is not helping financial firms make money yet.

Banks still need to specify their exact use cases for the

technology, the chief AI and data officer of BMO

Financial Group told the conference on Wednesday.

"The hype cycle brought a lot of positive attention to this

space. I am chief AI officer now because there was a little bit

of a hype cycle," said Kristin Milchanowski, who was appointed

to the role at BMO, one of Canada's largest banks, in October.

"I do believe that people thought it was going to impact the

revenue or have a cost takeout different from what the effect

actually has been," Milchanowski said, adding, "We're not seeing

revenue-generating activity."

So far, AI has been most useful in tasks such as shrinking

the time BMO's equities teams need to produce reports - an

important part of many investment banks' offerings - from more

than four hours a day to less than one, leaving the analysts

free to do more creative tasks.

It is important to identify specific use cases for AI in the

future, Milchanowski added, and pinpointed potential

applications in optimising trades and generating clients.