The nation’s largest banks are moving quickly to weave AI-powered digital assistants into their everyday operations, working to figure out how these automated tools fit alongside human workers and clients as competition in the sector heats up.
Financial institutions are locked in a race to adopt what’s known as agentic AI — artificial intelligence capable of completing tasks with little to no human direction — across departments ranging from wealth management to trading, client screening, and treasury functions. The goal is a significant boost in productivity by letting these digital agents act independently on behalf of users while working side by side with human employees.
“We are working with banks in particular on agents and human employees … to help the banks look at all the roles end to end, and then determine which ones are hybrid roles, which ones are agentic employees, which ones are only human employees,” said Peter Torrente, U.S. sector leader for banking at KPMG. A survey conducted by KPMG in June found that 51% of banks were already running pilot programs for AI agents.
Across the industry, major financial players are either already using or actively planning to use agentic AI in a wide range of daily functions.
Koren Maranca, who leads Artificial Intelligence for Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley, said the bank plans to begin testing digital assistants later this summer that will be available to interact with clients around the clock. Morgan Stanley already relies on AI agents to support financial advisors with a variety of tasks. “We are now preparing these agents to start pushing reminders or recommendations to the financial advisors regarding their clients,” Maranca said. These assistants are designed to evaluate investments, propose strategies, and help build client portfolios.
At BNY, digital workers are treated much like human teammates — assigned specific duties, able to communicate with one another, and even given login credentials and nicknames. BNY’s CEO Robin Vince described the setup on a Wall Street Journal podcast earlier this year. “The digital employee has a login, it can actually operate in the systems, and it actually has a … human manager that’s responsible for training it, making sure that it actually is doing all the right things, like a performance review, if you will, quality control, and it has tasks every day,” Vince explained, using the bank’s AI assistant known as Payment Pete as an example. BNY did not respond when contacted for comment.
UBS financial advisors receive thousands of automated alerts each day through their AI agents, flagging situations that require attention — such as a client whose annuity is about to mature and needs to be reinvested. “They gather all internal information from meetings, accounts and e-mail communications,” said Richard James, head of AI product at UBS. Once an advisor decides on a course of action with a client, AI agents can carry out trades and process money transfers, James added. UBS says the technology has enabled advisors to spend 70% of their time in direct conversations with clients rather than on routine administrative work.
Goldman Sachs joined forces with Anthropic earlier this year to build agents capable of handling trading, transaction accounting, client screening, and onboarding. JPMorgan has identified corporate treasury as an area with strong potential for AI transformation, while Citi is preparing to introduce an AI-powered virtual wealth management team member.
“Banks are increasingly using agentic AI and figuring out more ways to use it because it has a lot of potential,” said Bhavi Mehta, global lead for advanced analytics in financial services at Bain & Company.
Bank investors have been pressing for clarity on what kind of return they’re getting on technology spending as AI investments continue to grow. “Investors are asking, where should we be looking for ROI on these tech spends and that’s why banks are likely to focus on certain areas of AI spends where the returns are much more evident and can be scaled up,” said Torrente.
The expanding role of AI agents is also drawing attention to questions of accountability and oversight. When banks deploy these tools, they grant them access to internal systems — but with built-in limits and safeguards. Morgan Stanley’s Maranca emphasized that human oversight will remain a constant, and that agents will not be given the authority to independently make portfolio decisions.
“They are still primarily using it for internal purposes and are being extremely cautious when it touches the customer and are making sure that there is a human involved for any critical functions,” said Mehta.
