Citi Debuts Platform to Bring AI Agents to Banking Work

Banking giant Citi has debuted a platform to let it launch artificial intelligence agents throughout the company.

The agents created through the new Arc platform “enhance human judgment by taking on tasks such as research, synthesis, preparation, and execution,” Citi said in its announcement last week, thus “reducing manual effort and accelerating how teams operate day to day.”

The announcement cites the example of a banker in Citi’s wealth division who might spend hours preparing for a client meeting, while a team of AI agents can do that work “proactively” and deliver the information as needed.

“By eliminating hours of manual effort, the banker will be able to spend more of their time building deeper relationships with clients and delivering more personalized, timely service,” Citi continued. “The role of the banker, therefore, evolves more decisively from coordinator to architect and adviser.”

Citi noted that it has developed a foundation for this work, with more than 80% of its workers with access to in-house AI tools using them regularly.

“Arc builds on that foundation. Every agent will be monitored, auditable and governed. We will know what agents are doing, how they are doing it and the value they deliver,” the bank said.

According to the announcement, Arc will initially be used by developers to build agents for “specific, well-defined use cases” before a wider rollout.

Recent projections by Citi say the global AI market will exceed $4.2 trillion by 2030, with nearly half that total — $1.9 trillion — related to enterprise AI. The bank’s earlier forecast had put the worldwide AI market at $3.5 trillion, with around $1.2 trillion coming from enterprise AI.

In related news, PYMNTS Intelligence/Worldpay research shows that autonomous AI is shifting from “theory into practical commerce.”

The findings show that 43% of retailers are piloting autonomous AI, while 81% say they trust AI’s ability to function autonomously when the right guardrails have been set up. That’s a sign of  “a market that is still early, but no longer sitting on the sidelines,” PYMNTS wrote recently.

Meanwhile, 95% of consumers have at least one concern about agentic commerce, though, 50% would trust agentic commerce more if they knew what anti-fraud measures were in place.

“The broader message: The opportunity is real, but adoption will depend less on novelty than on whether the industry can make the experience secure, understandable and easy to trust,” PYMNTS added.