Big Banks Are Already Using Agentic AI. If Your FI Ready for It?
Agentic AI has quietly moved from concept to deployment at the largest banks in the country. A recent KPMG survey found that just over half of banks are now piloting AI agents and the pilots aren't just small experiments.
Morgan Stanley is preparing digital assistants that will interact with wealth clients around the clock, surfacing recommendations directly to financial advisors. Goldman Sachs has partnered with Anthropic to build agents that handle trading, transaction accounting, and client onboarding. Citi is rolling out an AI-powered virtual "team member" for wealth management.
Even at the infrastructure layer, FIS and Anthropic announced a partnership this spring to embed AI agents directly into core banking workflows.
These are big banks with dedicated AI teams and budgets most community financial institutions can't match. But the lessons learned through their pilot programs are applicable for institutions of all sizes.
The Foundation Cannot Be Ignored
The most important lesson? AI is only as good as the data it can actually reach.
Most banks and credit unions don't have a data shortage. They have a data access problem. The core holds one piece of the consumer relationship. The CRM holds another. Digital banking hold a third.
None of it talks to the others, so no single system — and no AI agent built on top of those systems — ever sees the full picture.
Cornerstone Advisors' survey on data quality and data use among banks backs this up: only a quarter of institutions qualified as high performers, meaning three-quarters of financial institutions are building their AI strategies on a flawed foundation.
That's why the question every institution needs to answer before investing in the next AI tool is not "which agent should we buy," but "can our systems actually feed it what it needs?"