Financial institutions have deployed machine learning and automation for years.
More recently, generative AI has accelerated that shift, with banks deploying copilots, coding assistants and customer-facing tools across the organisation
Despite this, most banking systems are fundamentally designed around human users: retail customers, traders, relationship managers or portfolio managers, and the engineering teams responsible for the software. The basic assumption remains that a person will log in, navigate a screen, interpret the data, follow a process and decide what happens next. Agentic AI is starting to challenge this.
Unlike generative tools that primarily produce answers, agentic AI systems can plan, call tools, execute tasks and work towards a defined goal. The new design question This shift is starting to reach the industry and is poised to accelerate rapidly. According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s 2026 Global AI in Financial Services report, 52% of firms are already piloting or deploying agentic AI, while 81% of respondents expect autonomous agents to be meaningfully achieved by 2030.