By Arunava Bag, CTO at Digitate
Since the AI boom of 2023, there has been no shortage of speculation about how new technologies will transform industries. This enthusiasm for AI has only grown as businesses have moved beyond experimentation and begun to use generative AI (genAI) in full production and started implementing it at scale.
Riding the wave of genAI, agentic AI rose to prominence earlier this year. It has furthered the next major phase in the AI revolution called the ‘autonomous enterprise’, which allows businesses to achieve a higher level of productivity and maturity Agentic AI promises to be an upgrade on the benefits genAI brings in, that is, being able to complete an end-to-end process without human intervention (with option of human in the loop/augmented ops for very critical decision making). As the term ‘agent’ implies, it acts on behalf of the human.
Simply put, given a complex task, agentic AI can orchestrate multiple steps through various AI agents and complete it. The steps are stitched through capabilities to perceive, reason, act, while learning in the process.
As the banking and financial services sector continues to embrace emerging technologies, agentic AI could carve out a crucial role for itself, not just in improving autonomous operations but in transforming employee and customer experiences. What if this implementation of AI can go beyond only being an ‘efficiency tool’, which is plenty (also very useful), but also deliver happier, more productive banking teams?
The socio-economic opportunities of AI
Recent data from Evident reveals that the financial services sector has seen a thirteen per cent surge in AI-specific hiring over the past six months. While many companies continue to reduce headcount, major players like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup are leading the way in this AI hiring spree. Although some of this hiring may focus on operational gains, it also aims towards achieving transformational growth and also points to a more subtle emerging opportunity: a strategic investment in people with niche and contemporary skills.
Furthermore, AI can be a tool for transforming employee experiences. In a 2025 global survey, nearly sixty per cent of employees using AI tools reported a reduction in workload stress, attributing this to automation of repetitive tasks and enhanced task prioritisation. AI is demonstrating that productivity and employee well-being are closely intertwined in the financial services sector.
The transition to agentic AI can create systems in which there is a newfound need for growth—what happens when both your mundane and some complex workload gets reduced? A new imperative for employees to reskill or upskill, or both, becomes obvious, creating new opportunities for education and lifelong learning. This can, in turn, accelerate innovation and drive sustainable organisational results.
The employee happiness agent
Automating repetitive, manual tasks, such as transaction monitoring, compliance reporting, and routine customer inquiries, frees up teams to focus on higher-value activities like complex risk assessments, client relationship management, and strategic decision-making. This not only reduces burnout from monotonous workloads but also fosters a more empowered, engaged workforce. This is especially true in financial services, where employees typically work longer hours than in many other professions, and the likelihood of human error could be calamitous when dealing with fiscal matters. Agentic AI pushes the boundary further to take over some complex workload (with orchestration and reasoning needs) and thus can help employees reduce mistakes caused by fatigue or distraction by handling some of those tasks independently.
The keyword underlying agentic systems is ‘autonomy’. This means that employees can delegate tasks to an AI agent and trust that it has the capabilities to carry out those tasks end-to-end, adapt to changes when necessary, and reorient itself in complex situations—all of which would require no or very little human intervention.
Agentic AI could offer a commercial and cultural advantage for financial services organisations, driving performance while creating workplaces where people can thrive. It’s a win-win for staff, customers and both top and bottom line. Eighty-two per cent of employees in the same survey stated that AI has improved the quality of their work, contributing to greater job satisfaction.
How humans and AI will shape the future of work, together
The promise of an agentic AI isn’t about achieving complete automation but rather about creating an environment where technology and human expertise complement each other perfectly. This is often enabled through augmented operations and human in the loop paradigms, where some necessary key decision points can be run through a human. When human intelligence and insight are combined with generative AI and prescriptive AI, we unlock a powerful trinity that drives innovation and competitive advantage.
In this new era, humans will be more effective not only because they’ll have better tools to repetitive simple tasks, extract insights from business processes and incorporate them into strategic decisions, which is a general advantage of AI. But the tools of an autonomous enterprise, such as agentic AI, will simplify conversations and accelerate problem solving or complex task resolution at scale. At the same time, streamlining operations, enhancing customer experiences, enabling faster decision making and more personalised services, and greater operational resilience in a rapidly evolving world.
The future of work in finance will depend on systems built on an agentic architecture, delivering advanced intelligence, decision making, learning and automation. This agentic AI-driven transformational impact will minimise the need for human effort in some areas and channel it to more apt and complex tasks and maximise productivity and job satisfaction.
