The Future of Financial Services: A Limitless Digital Workforce

Autonomous artificial intelligence agents are empowering workers and helping financial services companies deliver unmatched customer experiences. Attendees at the recent Agentforce Financial Services Summit in Sydney heard how new AI agent templates can fast-track your efforts to support workers, improve customer engagement, boost productivity and free up more time for employees to do high-value, priority work.

Increasing use of AI agents to automate key business processes has seen the financial services industry reach an “incredible inflection point,” said Eran Agrios, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Financial Services, Salesforce, by streamlining efficiency and allowing financial services firms to personalise their engagement with clients to the point where each can be treated as an “audience of one”.

It’s a vision that Salesforce has been working towards for 18 months, Eran explained, welcoming attendees to the Agentforce Financial Services Summit with a glimpse of the limitless new possibilities that AI agents, through the new Agentforce platform, are making possible.

Businesses “are being asked to innovate really quickly and deliver results faster than they’ve ever been asked to do before,” she explained, noting that many financial services organisations were finding their existing processes aren’t up to the task.

Indeed, the recent Salesforce Connected Financial Services Report found that 56% of customers feel their institutions don’t anticipate their financial needs and 55% expect financial services institutions to use AI to speed their transactions.

This has made it necessary for financial services organisations to be proactive in adopting agentic AI, Eran said, flagging the efficiency benefits available to companies that introduce an industry-aware digital workforce in which AI agents proactively analyse Salesforce customer data to support the work of human employees.

She urged attendees to think laterally about how automated agents could improve the way their business runs: automatically collating data to prepare for meetings, for example, or processing the outcomes of meetings to follow up with stakeholders or clients.

Salesforce is speeding that process with the release of Agentforce for Financial Services, a library of pre-built Agentforce templates and actions that businesses can use to kickstart the adoption of AI agents across their businesses.

AI agents are ready to get to work in your business

In the agentic AI era, agents can not only better engage with your customers, but can tailor their activities to fit within your company’s unique operational policies and procedures.

Using Agentforce, businesses can create AI agents with domain-specific user personas and workflows, industry data models, third-party connectors, industry features and process libraries, industry apps and extensions, along with a compliance engine and trust layer – all of which work together to automate low-value tasks while respecting company policies.

These tools enable financial services companies to build AI agents that guide customers through initial information gathering, product education, comparison, application pre-screening and more – all without tying up human workers who report losing 41% of their time to low-value and repetitive tasks.

“If you ask a financial advisor whether they want to spend 40% of their day looking through notes in their CRM, they don’t want to do that,” Eran said. “They [would prefer] to spend time with their clients.”

The pre-built, role-based AI agent templates within Agentforce for Financial Services include financial advisor and banker agents to gather insights about clients and support financial advisors and bankers during and after meetings; banking and insurance service agents that handle routine service requests like reversing fees or cancelling credit cards; and a digital loan officer agent that guides borrowers through product discovery around car or personal loans.

Each of these templates addresses specific pain points that are common to financial services firms – and can make a massive difference if you’re looking for ways to help your workforce operate more efficiently and effectively.

“Think about what you could do in your organisation,” Eran said, “if you had a limitless [AI] workforce that has industry expertise, and understands the business and regulatory landscape.”

AI is already driving change in the real world

According to the Connected Financial Services Report, financial services customers are welcoming AI into every aspect of their daily online interactions. For example, 73% of survey respondents say they are interested in financial services firms using AI to identify opportunities for lower prices, while 61% are interested in the use of AI to complete routine tasks.

Gartner sees AI-powered interactions all but replacing traditional customer service channels: by 2028, the firm has predicted that 70% of customer service journeys will be initiated within conversational third-party assistants built into their mobile devices – and 30% of Fortune 500 companies will only offer customer support through a single, AI-enabled channel.

ANZ Bank has been working on ways to best incorporate AI agents into its customer experience. Gerard Florian, ANZ Group Executive, Technology and Group Services, was on hand at the Agentforce Financial Services Summit to share his experiences working to enhance bank processes using AI.

“We’re trying to start with the process and understand the end-to-end process, then break it down into tasks and think about the data involved in that process,” he said, explaining that by using a ‘triangle’ of process, data, and tasks “you start to have a conversation around ‘where does AI fit in?’”

“We have a retail, commercial, and institutional bank,” he said. “They have very different needs, and they need to be able to innovate at their own pace.”

Employee training has proven crucial, he said, noting the success of AI Immersion Centres in Melbourne, New Zealand and India, which have already seen around 2000 staff trained to integrate AI into their workflows in just one year.

“There are a lot of different tasks and some particular areas to focus on,” he said, “and being mindful of the risks of getting a balanced conversation is helping us build momentum for what is probably the single biggest change program we will all go through over the next few years.”

Building a foundation of trust

CIOs are overwhelmingly on board, with 84% of enterprise CIOs in a recent Salesforce survey confirming they believe AI will be as significant to their business as the rise of the internet.

Salesforce Principal Solution Engineer, Jason Hanna and Strategic Solution Engineer, Scott Barter, took to the stage to demonstrate how Agentforce’s AI-driven process intelligence, building on the strengths of Salesforce’s widely adopted Financial Services Cloud, can automatically qualify new opportunities without human intervention, then support bank relationship managers as they pick up and convert new leads.

Broadly adopting AI agents requires confidence in the technology’s abilities and implementation, noted Keran Wijetunga, Salesforce Director of AI and Data Solution Engineering.

“It’s not enough that the agent is effective at their job,” he continued. “They also need to maintain data security and privacy as well – and this just happens to be what we’re delivering at Salesforce.”

Chalking up the wins

Closing out the keynote, two financial services technology leaders joined a panel discussion to talk about their experiences in preparing their organisations for the era of AI agents.

Bridging the gap between traditional practices and AI-enabled best practice has taken time, said Jacqui Lennon, Chief of Technology and Transformation, Zurich – who lauded the executives and business leaders whose support has “really transformed the whole organisation.”

Risk and compliance are fundamental to financial services, Jacqui explained, but by steadily steering the conversation towards the benefits of AI agents and incorporating controls to ensure risk and compliance are managed, she said, “I’ve scrapped [a lot of] busy work.”

HSBC, for its part, is using a continuous feedback loop and net promoter score (NPS) ratings to track the effectiveness of its transformation efforts.

“We have to go into this change eyes wide open,” said Steve Van Wyk, Chairman of the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) and a former Group CIO with HSBC, “as we think about AI really permeating through the workforce.”

The creation of a limitless digital workforce, in which AI agents work alongside human specialists, presents both opportunities and challenges – but as the speakers and customers at the Summit made abundantly clear, the key to success for any financial services organisation is simply getting started. The more you work with AI agents, the clearer their value will be – and the more your customers will want to join you in your AI-enabled future.