The move from AI to AGI to Agentic AI

It’s interesting to see AI appearing more and more in financial conversations. A few examples just this week:

• AI’s Role in Banking: A Game Changer or Just Another Fad?
• How Artificial Intelligence is changing banking
• How AI is helping banks support sustainability transformation. The ability to quickly process large amounts of data makes AI models attractive...
• Mastercard Leads AI Evolution in Banking, Payments, and Fraud Prevention
• Leading the AI revolution at Lloyds Banking Group
• Banks Tap Into AI For A Productivity Revolution

The interesting part for me is that few are delineating between AI, as in chatbots, and Agentic AI, as in infomediaries. AI as an assistant to respond to customer questions is an easy implementation. Just let the chatbot do it, and avoid someone calling the call centre. Agentic AI in banking and finance is far more like the vision I set out in Intelligent Finance: where money thinks for you. It is proactive and not reactive.

This chart makes it clear:

Source: Tech Target

And the key is that we have moved in the last two years from a web that we push to a web that pulls us.

Right now ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot and more are transforming our search and find world. Midjourney, Ideogram and others are making our world of images better. But it goes far beyond this:

• Chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Meta AI, Zapier Central)
• Search engines (Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Arc Search)
• Content creation (Jasper, Anyword, Writer)
• Grammar checkers and rewording tools (Grammarly, Wordtune, ProWritingAid)
• Video creation and editing (Runway, Descript, Wondershare Filmora)
• Image generation (DALL·E 3, Midjourney, Ideogram)
• Social media management (FeedHive, Vista Social, Buffer)
• Voice and music generation (ElevenLabs, Suno, AIVA)
• Knowledge management and AI grounding (Mem, Notion AI Q&A, Personal AI)
• Task and project management (Asana, Any.do, BeeDone)
• Transcription and meeting assistants (Fireflies, Avoma, tl;dv)
• Scheduling (Reclaim, Clockwise, Motion)
• Email (Shortwave, Microsoft Copilot Pro for Outlook, Gemini for Gmail)
• Slide decks and presentations (Tome, Beautiful.ai, Slidesgo)
• Resume builders (Teal, Enhancv, Kickresume)
• Other AI productivity tools

Source: Zapier

In other words, every part of our lives is being invaded by AI. But the key point here is that there is AI you use to ask questions and get answers, and AI that gives you answers when you haven’t even asked the question. Unlike robotic process automations which perform repetitive tasks, agentic AI understands and decides the necessity of actions before performing them, continually learning from its experiences.

In the financial services industry, agentic AI’s potential is particularly significant. It can analyse vast quantities of data to tailor financial advice, investment strategies, and savings plans to current market conditions and individual preferences.

It is clear that last year was ChatGPT. Next year is Agentic AI, and I’ll be blogging a lot more about this later as 2025 looks like the year of Agentic AI.