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Sam Altman just made the news by admitting he’s been “very wrong” about the AI timeline, and this report from Adobe suggests banks owe their investors a similar confession.
Altman told a podcaster: “The economy just has so much inertia... we’ve all been too ambitious on timelines.”
Altman is correct, and while he was talking about the broader economy, those comments fit banking perfectly, as regulated environments like banking come with their own inertia.
Adobe and Incisiv surveyed 528 financial services executives and found that 60% of financial services organizations are stuck in the “Frozen Middle,” stalled at piloting or deploying AI but unable to scale.
Then, just to bring up the rear, there are another 14% that are still exploring or haven’t started at all.
Adobe shows that the delays are real and taking their toll, with only 15 out of every 100 proposed AI use cases reaching production.
For many, the 85 failed use cases are learning lessons that can’t be avoided. Failure in AI and innovation is high, and it’s normal. Still, for bankers who see AI as an IT project, these failure rates cause real problems.
Banking’s historical passion for punishing all failures hasn’t gone away, and Adobe finds that 29% respond to AI failures with blame rather than learning. This is a holdover from banking’s past that has no place in a modern agile organization.
Bank management of AI is demonstrably terrible and can be justly blamed for some of the delay.
Only 20% have named a formal AI owner with title and budget authority, while 75% manage business-IT collaboration through handoffs rather than shared accountability.
But just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, just 14% measure AI ROI comprehensively, meaning that most AI projects don’t even have a reasonable metric for long-term profitability.
The picture that Adobe painted is one of banking managerial dysfunction at the highest level.
But who are we kidding? Who thought banks would ever smoothly adopt and deploy a complex new technology like AI when it took them nearly a decade to build a sharp new banking app?
This doesn’t mean AI in banking is failing. It means the predictions of agentic banks that are right around the corner will be more delayed than many will admit.
AI needs more time to develop and be implemented in banking than anyone predicted, and that goes for everyone from consultants like McKinsey to AI vendors themselves, who were brimming with optimism.
Altman again: “People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way.”
That is the banking industry in one sentence, even if he didn’t intend it.
Will banks follow Altman’s lead and admit the timeline was always too aggressive, or keep pretending that the pilot that they show investors will be up and running any time now?
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