Dive Brief:
- Banks ramped up AI adoption as agentic tools began to gain traction in the sector during the first half of the year, according to an Evident Insights’ AI report published last week. The number of new use cases launched by 50 of the world’s largest financial firms doubled compared to the last half of 2024 while the number of technologists working on agentic AI grew more than tenfold, the analysis found.
- More than half of the 173 use cases deployed by the banks analyzed leveraged generative AI capabilities, Evident said. Nine of the 50 firms documented AI agents in the pilot or production phase, but BNY, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase were the only firms to disclose details of the supporting architecture for agentic workflows.
- Banks are grappling with twin objectives, according to the report. “They are optimizing potential outcomes from generative AI deployments, while simultaneously assessing early experiments with agentic AI,” Evident said.
Dive Brief:
Banks expect to reap substantial rewards from sustained investments in generative AI capabilities. The technology’s ability to harness vast stores of untapped enterprise data, digest raw documentation and deliver insights that expedite analytics and customer service processes are already transforming daily operations, as developers test the mettle of natural language assistants to ease cumbersome coding tasks.
While most of the focus thus far has been directed toward internal use cases, a shift toward the customer is underway. “The vast majority … of Gen AI applications define the end user as a bank employee,” the firm said. Only 15 of 97 generative AI use cases currently deployed are accessible to clients, account holders or prospective customers without a human intermediary.
Retail banking has taken the lead on outward-facing assistants, using generative AI to upgrade legacy chatbots and power in-app avatars that personalize device-based customer interactions.
Wells Fargo, for example, beefed up its Fargo virtual banking assistant with Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and several other smaller internal models, Evident said. The bank is aiming to up its agentic game through an expanded partnership with Google announced earlier this month.
Commerzbank leaned on Microsoft’s Azure AI toolkit to roll out AI avatar Ava in April. The app-based assistant answers general banking questions and is designed to provide customers with personalized account information, the company said in an announcement.
As other firms weigh the risks of entrusting customer outcomes to generative AI, daily usage is proliferating internally. Ten of the leading banks in the Evident AI Index, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America, have collectively placed AI tools in the hands of over 800,000 employees, representing two-thirds of their workforce.
Banks have had the biggest AI wins to date in front office applications and IT and security functions, according to Evident. More than two-thirds of use cases with reported outcomes, including tools that assist sales, were concentrated in these areas.
“Leading banks will use the back half of the year to scale generative AI – and work to put more tools in customers’ hands,” Evident said in a post accompanying the report. “As they scale AI and ramp up to agentic, they’ll look to bring the tech everywhere across the bank.”
