51% of Banks Piloting AI Agents to Boost Productivity

America’s banking giants are reportedly increasing their use of digital assistants to increase their productivity.

As Reuters reported Monday (July 13), banks are promoting agentic artificial intelligence (AI) for things like wealth, client vetting, treasury and trading, focusing on agents that can both autonomously take action on behalf of users and work alongside humans.

“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 last month by that company found that a little more than half (51%) of banks were piloting AI agents, the report added.

Koren Maranca, head of artificial intelligence for wealth management at Morgan Stanley, told Reuters the bank will begin testing digital assistants later this summer that will interact with clients around the clock.

“We ​are now preparing these agents to start pushing reminders or recommendations to the financial advisors regarding their clients,” said Maranca. These assistants can analyze investments, recommend strategies and help build portfolios, the report added.

Reuters also notes some agentic AI efforts at other banks, including a partnership between Goldman Sachs and Anthropic to develop agents for things like trading and transaction accounting, client vetting and onboarding, and Citi’s plans for 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,” Bhavi Mehta, global lead for advanced analytics in financial services at Bain & Company, told Reuters.

In related news, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster spoke last week with Maik Taro Wehmeyer, co-founder and CEO at Taktile, who projected that 2026 will be “the year where AI will come to financial services.”

As that report noted, AI solutions allow small business loans that once needed weeks of manual underwriting to potentially be approved in minutes, while insurance claims that historically required months of evaluation can be handled within hours thanks to drone imagery and AI-powered damage assessments.

“I think many people by now confuse AI transformation with cost savings,” Wehmeyer said, noting that the bigger competitive advantage now comes from AI’s ability to dramatically shrink decision times.

“If I’m a small business owner and I’m asking for a loan, and I get the answer not within 14 days … but within five minutes, how great is that?” he said.