Banks quickly adopt AI agents to raise efficiency, automate tasks, and free Staff for creative, high-value work.

Banks are recognizing the advantages of using AI agents to automate certain tasks, freeing up Staff for more creative work, and are quickly expanding their use cases. According to Capgemini, the technology could generate up to $450 billion in economic value over the next three years.

BNY, a global financial services company, recently hired several AI agents in various areas of the bank. During a panel discussion at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida, last month, BNY CIO Leigh-Ann Russell stated that AI bots handle security risks for the bank, a duty that no one loves to do.

As digital engineers, the bank's AI agents solve simple code problems on their own and provide completion reports to their human supervisors. The agents will inform their managers if the problem is a complicated code issue. Russell stated, this frees up the engineers to do new feature releases and other interesting stuff. Wells Fargo and Citigroup, two financial services firms, also provided workers access to agentic AI tools. However, the trend for AI agents is not unique to the financial services sector. AI agents are also being adopted by PepsiCo, Walmart, and Colgate-Palmolive.

According to Khokhar in the release, banks and other industries are able to use the power of AI agents because of the combination of AI and cloud. Only 10% of companies are using AI agents at scale, but the fact that use of the technology is expected to increase, with 80% of financial services firms in the concept or pilot stage of use. As well, 92% of banks stated that a skills gap is one of the main challenges to the use of AI agents, second only to regulatory and compliance issues at 96%.

AI return on investment is also being limited by high implementation costs. Likewise, Khokhar added, leaders must think about how to grow their agentic AI operations over time and how they want their businesses to appear at the conclusion of this process.