The snow has melted and e the proverbial dust has settled in Davos, and if there was one resounding takeaway from the World Economic Forum, it’s this: growth is no longer the primary objective. Trust is.
In a landscape where “Agentic Enterprises” are moving from concept to reality, the conversation among global leaders — including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Google’s Ruth Porat, BTG Pactual’s André Esteves, and RBC’s David McKay — wasn’t just about what AI can do, but how we can ensure it does it safely.
For Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) technology buyers, the message was clear. Waiting for regulation to clear the runway will not happen. Your own internal controls must lead the way, and you have to find the right partner to help you land the proverbial AI plane.
Trust, Responsibility, and Regulation
Benioff introduced a cautionary tone, arguing that while growth forecasts for the U.S. are high (3-6%), the industry faces a crisis of trust. He cited instances where AI models have caused social harm and called for tech companies to be held responsible for their impacts, similar to traditional media.
- Bold and Responsible: Porat echoed the need to be “bold and responsible,” while Joly stressed that governments must maintain sovereignty to protect the vulnerable.
- Accountability over Hype: Benioff noted that it isn’t just about growth without trust; trust must remain at the center, with businesses held accountable for putting controls in place.
- The Social Media Lesson: Leaders warned that AI must avoid the pitfalls of social media’s past—specifically citing the “Character AI debacle” as a wake-up call for the industry.
- Safety in Scale: Many banks are now pivoting away from smaller fintech partners in favor of larger, established partners to mitigate security vulnerabilities.
The Future of the “Human Touch”
Despite the digital push, Esteves argued that a “human touch” remains essential for security and effectiveness in high-income retail and wealth management. McKay suggested a middle ground by reinventing the branch: one agent can now serve three channels simultaneously—physical clients, chat lines, and call center queues—dramatically increasing branch productivity.
McKay spoke about how agentic technology has already advanced their service branch operations and wealth relationship management. Porat saw a significant shift from simple automation to agentic technology with the need for less friction and more customer value.
Digital Assets and Frictionless Finance
Customers are flocking to digital currency for ease; there is less friction than foreign exchange concessions in simple digital wallet payments. These frictionless systems are built on trust. The boom in decentralized ledger for finance, known as DeFi built on the blockchain, has enabled the explosion of digital assets (tokens) into every asset class, fueled by deregulation, has surged 232% to $18.6 billion with participation from large firms, like JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs at institutional and retail levels.
Recently, the NYSE publicized plans to open a 24/7 digital asset exchange, requiring a frictionless, always-on service model where trust and security are paramount. We have lessons from the past that we should learn from.
More Trust = Less Friction
The Great Recession of 2008 took almost a decade to reach full recovery after a loss of nearly $19 trillion in wealth and over 10% unemployment. Mountains of regulation followed. That’s the pattern: a bubble pops and regulation follows.
With that pattern, the financial services sector remains one of the most globally regulated industries on the planet, and for good reason. Yet, with all the headwinds of regulation, innovation continues to thrive. Does AI built on trust actually make banking safer? Many panelists at Davos left the question unanswered.
Trust Is Built In
At Salesforce, we believe the answer lies in the architecture. Agentforce 360 for Financial Services is a data-driven unified platform built on trust.
Regulated industries, like banks, wealth managers, and insurers, have trusted us with their data over the last twenty-six years; we take that seriously as we move to empower these same customers to become agentic enterprises. Built on a foundation of absolute security, this isn’t just another AI tool—it’s a compliance-first engine designed for the zero-error world of commercial banking.
- Data Actioning at Scale Data 360 and Informatica provide an end-to-end intelligent data and metadata foundation that provides a complete contextual view of your entire business so that you can activate your data across all your apps and experiences
- The Einstein Trust Layer: Unlike competitors that leave you to build your own guardrails, Agentforce differentiates itself through financial-enterprise grade security and a pre-configured compliance framework.
- Slack as your OS agent platform to communicate, transact, schedule and work internally and externally securely.
- Hybrid Reasoning: In banking, “close enough” isn’t good enough. Agentforce employs hybrid reasoning—discerning exactly when to use creative, probabilistic reasoning and when to enforce strict, deterministic precision.
You can use our secure agent-to-agent integrations with Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from Open AI to dispute a fraudulent transaction, finalize a commercial loan pre-approval, or even take client meeting notes and make portfolio-level action plans. The advanced agentic technology is great, but it only has value if you can trust that the connection with your customer is secure and seamless. The real currency is trust. Trust is earned over time. Salesforce has endeavored to earn their customers trust over the last quarter century from the cloud to mobile to data to agents.
The Path Forward
The “uncertainty about regulation” may be troubling, but your technology stack shouldn’t be. RBC and ABSA made a decision to become Agentic Enterprises to ensure customer success and grow their respective top lines, with the risk of uncertainty and in the headwinds of change. However, they chose a common partner to help them navigate a path forward: Salesforce. Learn more about RBC and ABSA respective journeys today!
