The banking industry is expected to take greater advantage of AI heading into 2026 as models advance and enterprise tools for agent design mature, a sentiment shared by several top executives in recent earnings calls.
BNY CEO Robin Vince said the company made significant advances in AI adoption last year, “underscoring our industry leadership in the burgeoning space.”
Vince pointed to the banking giant’s collaboration with Google Cloud to integrate Gemini Enterprise capabilities into its AI platform, Eliza, as well as furthering its partnership with model developer OpenAI to deploy the technology at scale.
“We expect that, over time, AI will allow us to remake many of our processes and systems in new and exciting ways,” Vince said during the earnings call Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Bank of America invested “several hundred million dollars” in AI, with 20 projects ongoing across the company, CEO Brian Moynihan said. But the firm is still working to reap the technology’s full benefits. “Next year, we should get more out of it as we figure out and apply it across [the company],” Moynihan said during the company’s earnings call Wednesday.
Banks are already seeing improvements in software engineering, risk management and customer service thanks to AI agents and generative AI, according to Accenture’s Top Banking Trends for 2026 report published earlier this week.
“If you think of all the changes going on right now not as constraining but as unconstraining, you think of it in a very different way,” Michael Abbott, senior managing director and global banking lead at Accenture, told CIO Dive. “There is an enormous amount of opportunity about to be unleashed in banking.”
Citigroup is assessing where AI fits into more than 50 of the financial services firm’s “largest and most complex processes,” from “know your customer” functionalities to loan underwriting, CEO Jane Fraser said.
Implementing AI into those processes will drive new sources of efficiency that “we couldn’t have imagined” three to four years ago, Fraser said.
“With much of our transformation behind us, we are shifting our focus to how we can use AI tools and automation to further innovate, reengineer and simplify our processes, beyond risk and controls, to improve client experience whilst reducing expenses,” Fraser said during the company’s earnings call Wednesday.
Confidence on the rise
While financial services firms ramped up AI initiatives in 2025 in pursuit of long-term efficiency gains, executives entered the new year with cautious optimism about their ability to extract value from previous efforts.
For Morgan Stanley, future growth hinges on successfully adopting AI throughout the enterprise and the investment banking firm’s client base, CEO Ted Pick said.
“With each passing quarter, our confidence continues to increase in the potential for both the efficiency and the effectiveness of AI-related technologies across the business units and infrastructure,” he said during the Thursday earnings call.
Goldman Sachs views AI as an opportunity to drive productivity and — eventually — efficiency, said CEO David Solomon.
The investment banking firm identified six operating processes it hopes to reshape with AI, a strategy it started in the fall of 2025, Solomon said. While the company is “making good progress,” Solomon declined to give more information during the Thursday earnings call and said he hopes to give updates throughout 2026 on the company’s AI-related efficiency gains.
“If we can remake processes and create more operating efficiency and flexibility, that will free up more capacity from an efficiency perspective to invest in growth areas,” Solomon said during the call.
AI adoption is expected to trim costs for the banking industry by up to 20%, according to McKinsey & Company’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025.
For banks to fully capitalize on AI in 2026, the industry will need to focus on enablement, Abbott said.
CIOs will need to build a foundation that allows every employee within the financial services firm — including legal, HR, IT, marketing and retail — to take advantage of AI, he said.
“Generative AI is going to impact and change the way work gets done in every single place,” Abbott said. “But that work won’t change until it’s enabled.”
