So far banks are overpromising and underdelivering on agentic artificial intelligence (AI), writes research firm Evident in a recent brief. Despite hyping up the future of agentic AI, banks aren’t embracing the autonomy part. Even when places like BNY and Capital One launch agentic tools, they keep humans in the loop at every turn.
There are several hurdles to going fully agentic that have slowed adoption. One exec told Evident that their risk team is already slammed preventing humans from inadvertently letting AI get too close to sensitive data or clients’ money. When you suggest that agents make decisions about clients’ finances themselves – and add in worries that these systems are vulnerable to hacking by crooks – you can understand some of the hesitation.
Another exec told the research firm the struggle with agentic was understanding why agents act the way they do: The more complex tasks agents take on, the harder it becomes to monitor them and find where they go wrong – which won’t sit well if regulators come calling. Still another said that integrating agents with the bank’s APIs and mainframes was the hardest part of ramping up to agentic. But without getting legacy systems and agents to cooperate, giving them more autonomy would just be letting them loose with half a brain.
That’s not to say banks have lost faith – or dropped the hyping. “Moving beyond a handful of agents into really implementing agentic in multiple ways,” is still J.P. Morgan’s CIO Lori Beer’s top priority this year. But, “there’s a lot of work to really make that happen.”