Dive Brief:
- Nearly 50% of banks and insurers are creating jobs for supervising AI agents, according to the World Cloud Report for Financial Services 2026, published Wednesday by the Capgemini Research Institute. The report is based on a survey of 1,100 financial institution executives and 40 executive interviews conducted earlier this year.
- The most common use case for agentic AI is customer service, according to 75% of banks surveyed by Capgemini. Nearly two-thirds use the technology for fraud detection, while 3 in 5 use it for loan processing and customer onboarding.
- “Our data reveals widespread industry optimism that the agentic era will open doors to new markets, signaling a new phase of transformation is upon us,” said Ravi Khokhar, EVP and global head of cloud for financial services at Capgemini, in a press release accompanying the report.
Dive Insight:
Banks are rapidly adding use cases and finding value in deploying AI agents to automate certain tasks, freeing up human employees for more enterprising work in the process. The technology could deliver up to $450 billion in economic value over the next three years, according to Capgemini.
Global financial services company BNY has deployed multiple AI agents throughout different parts of the bank. AI agents do vulnerability management for the bank, a task “no one loves to do,” BNY CIO Leigh-Ann Russell said during a panel discussion at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida, last month. BNY developed its AI agents in-house, which one-third of banks also reported doing in the Capgemini report. Only 16% reported buying AI agents off-the-shelf.
The bank’s AI agents operate in the role of “digital engineers” that fix low-complexity code issues autonomously and submit completion reports to their human managers. If it’s a high-complexity code issue, the agents will alert their managers.
“This frees up our engineers to do new feature releases and other fun stuff,” Russell said.
Financial services firm Citigroup has also deployed agentic AI tools to employees, as has Wells Fargo. But the financial services industry isn’t alone in its surge toward AI agents. PepsiCo, Walmart and Colgate-Palmolive are embracing AI agents as well.
The combination of AI and cloud is what’s enabling banks and other industries to tap into the power of AI agents, Khokhar said in the release.
However, while AI agent adoption is poised for growth with 80% of financial services firms in the ideation or pilot stage of deployment, only 10% of companies have implemented the technology at scale, the report found.
One of the biggest hurdles executives face with AI agent deployment is a skills gap, 92% of banks reported, second only to regulatory and compliance challenges at 96%. High implementation costs are also emerging as a barrier to AI return on investments, the report said.
“Leaders will need to consider how they can scale their agentic AI operation over time, and what they want their businesses to look like at the end of this process,” Khokhar said.
