One way to think of AI agents is that it is like having an unlimited number of highly-caliber junior staff. They can reason, research, and take actions for you.
Using that as a mental model, AI agents will:
- Trading – reduce market making costs.
- Asset management – act as analysts and asset allocators.
- Investment banking – do financial analysis.
- Retail – develop more granular products.
- Wealth management – inform clients.
- Insurance – improve underwriting.
- Operations – reduce operating costs.
- Technology – increase quantity of custom technology.
These are guesses – but give us a useful “future world state” that we can imagine to think about what this means for your business.
Some implications across markets – better liquidity, better capital markets, more global markets, international competition between jurisdictions, lower unit margins for existing businesses, product innovation, and new business models.
This means that almost every financial services function will look different in five years because of agentic AI.
There are first mover gains for businesses that can adjust quickly – immediate financial, winning customers to new product types before everyone is competing, and in gathering data. This last gain will be large for many businesses – as proprietary data is a key input for AI agents.