Imagining the future of banking with agentic AI

Adapting to new and emerging technologies like agentic AI is essential for an organization’s survival, says Murli Buluswar, head of US personal banking analytics at Citi. “A company’s ability to adopt new technical capabilities and rearchitect how their firm operates is going to make the difference between the firms that succeed and those that get left behind,” says Buluswar. “Your people and your firm must recognize that how they go about their work is going to be meaningfully different.”

The emerging landscape

Agentic AI is already being rapidly adopted in the banking sector. A 2025 survey of 250 banking executives by MIT Technology Review Insights found that 70% of leaders say their firm uses agentic AI to some degree, either through existing deployments (16%) or pilot projects (52%). And it is already proving effective in a range of different functions. More than half of executives say agentic AI systems are highly capable of improving fraud detection (56%) and security (51%). Other strong use cases include reducing cost and increasing efficiency (41%) and improving the customer experience (41%).

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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.