Shane Ernest

Every financial services firm is being pushed to reimagine how they operate. AI has made one thing clear: bolting AI onto a legacy process does not produce a transformative result. The process itself has to be rebuilt for a world where AI agents, people, and existing technologies work together to achieve the same goal. We call it the great process re-engineering, the shift from automating steps to redesigning how the work runs end to end.

Nearly every carrier today is running agentic AI pilots. Typically, these pilots are contained within an existing platform suite that can offer a small productivity boosts. The promise of agentic AI lies in completely reimagining the operating model to deliver transformative value. Easier said than done. The problem is not the technology or the data science team.

Open banking has spent a decade laying down data highways: APIs, consent frameworks, secure sharing. Now agentic AI shows up as the autonomous car. It can reason, plan, call multiple systems, and take action with minimal human input. In the words of Datos Insights, banks that master both data access and autonomous action “will define the next decade of financial services.” And it’s all converging right now. Retail banking economics are tightening fast.