More than half of banking jobs could be automated by AI — but banks will be slow to adopt, Citi report says

AI adoption in finance will be slow

The Citi researchers believe the “pace of implementing modern AI tools in financial services, in particular, GenAI, will be relatively slow when compared to other sectors,” they said in the report, in part because of the “highly regulated nature of the sector and lack of ‘ready to go globally aligned rules.'”

“A regulatory landscape is evolving in some jurisdictions, but it is a challenging road ahead for financial services firms when it comes to implementation because countries are moving to different speeds, taking different approaches towards regulation and in some cases changing their position on whether to regulate,” it said.

In an interview featured in the report, Shameek Kundu, the head of financial services and chief strategy officer at TruEra, weighed in on the same point.

“I would describe traditional AI adoption in financial services as: widespread, shallow, and inconsequential,” said Kundu.

Kundu explains that there are “a large number of enterprises experimenting with AI across different use cases,” yet “limited scale of AI adoption across use cases” and a “limited perceived impact of AI system failures on critical business operations.”

He cited a 2022 Bank of England survey, which found that “72% of firms reported using or developing machine learning applications,” yet the “median number of ML applications for mainstream UK financial institutions to be just 20-30” and “less than 20% of the already few AI use cases were critical to business.”