The state of AI agents in finance

It may seem like AI agents are suddenly doing everything across industries. But in reality, the pace of agentic AI is moving carefully, and very deliberately, in highly regulated environments like finance and banking.

In my latest feature for CIO Online, I dig into how CIOs are actually approaching agentic AI in finance today:

• automating tedious, low-risk work
• augmenting financial workflows and data aggregation
• improving incident response and customer experience

When it comes to higher-value operations, like end-to-end business processes, autonomous payments, or complex financial decisioning, things are more nascent. Because the guardrails matter a lot.

As Joe Wilson from CSG puts it: "When it comes to AI, we're facing death by 1,000 AI module cuts."

Huge thanks to the leaders who shared with me how they're navigating this transition. This one features, in order of appearance:

- Shree T Reddy, EVP and CIO, PenFed Credit Union
- Joseph W., SVP and CIO, CSG
- Daniel Shmitt, CIO, Salesforce
- Charles Hearn, CTO, Alloy
- Carl Froggett, CIO, Deep Instinct

The article also touches on emerging standards (x402, UCP, ACP) and recent research from Gravitee, Auditoria.AI, Harvard Business Review & Workato, Gartner, and Block.