Agentic AI Turbocharges Banks and The Do-It-For-Me Economy
But not without significant risk and challenges for all parties involved
CitiGPS just published the best resource yet on Agentic AI and is a hot read for everyone trying to stay ahead of the daily advances in AI.
Agentic AI will help banks enter the “Do-It-For-Me” (DIFM) economy, in which AI Agents autonomously perform tasks without our direct intervention.
This technology will be huge in banking, and one can imagine a self-programmed personal agent waiting patiently for foreign exchange or account balances to change before enacting our instructions.
This isn't sci-fi, but tech that is "coming soon," if we believe BigTech, whose references to agentic AI have increased 17x in the past 12 months.
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Given the media exposure Agentic AI has received, BigTech and management consultants are going “all-in” on it, betting that it will either pay off with extraordinary returns or leave them broke.
I see their go-for-broke mentality as a great show of confidence in agentic AI, even if the CitiGPS report leaves us with a warning when it clearly states: “Agentic AI is largely in an experimental phase.”
Agentic AI will likely be huge, the question is when will it be ready to roll out at scale? Will it be this year or in three? Astute readers will note that banks’ revenue boost from AI is always just over the next hill.
Noone should expect the transition to AgenticAI to be smooth sailing, there will be huge challenges to overcome:
👉AI Agents Will Present Significant Challenges
INVESTORS
🔹 How consolidated will the agent landscape become and in what timeframe?
🔹 Who will build the winning agents? Major LLMs or several fragmented / specialized providers?
BANKS
🔹 Who will own customer relationships? Banks or the provider of the agent purchasing on behalf of bank’s customer?
🔹 How will you prevent fraud and manage risk in the context of AI agent buyers?
PAYMENT SERVICE PROVIDERS
🔹 Are you ready to accept payments from an intelligent agent? How will you know the agent is legitimate?
🔹 Are any new capabilities necessary to ensure against purchase within the delegated spend authority?
INDEPENDENT SOFTWARE VENDORS
🔹 What role (if any) will there be for verticalized agents? How can agents augment your offering?
🔹 If so, do you possess enough proprietary data to train your own model?
PAYMENT INFRA
🔹 What is the appropriate business model for intelligent agent infrastructure? What will you be monetizing?
🔹 How do you orchestrate collaboration and engender trust to ensure agentic transactions are made consistently and safely?
REGULATORS
🔹 Can current legal mechanisms to delegate authority work for AI agents?
🔹 Is there an opportunity for supervisory agents to monitor financial institutions/PSPs activity and that of agents themselves?
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