How Agentic AI is transforming customer experience and financial services in 2025

Customer experience (CX) has always been a priority for financial firms. But today, they face growing competition, evolving expectations, and shifting market forces.

Many financial services companies recognize that AI is essential for transforming customer experience. But not just any kind of AI: they need agentic AI.

In this post, I'll highlight exactly what agentic AI is, how it's being applied in the financial sector, and why 2025 will be the year when everything changes.

The second half of this decade will be defined by agentic AI's role in improving customer experience across all industries, including financial services.

Let's dive in.

What is agentic AI and how is it being applied in financial services?

Agentic AI can be best understood through a comparison.

Think of two types of intelligence:

• Human intelligence is the ability to solve many different problems independently.
• Narrow intelligence is the ability to solve one specific problem really well.

Most existing business technologies use narrow intelligence. For example:

• AI chatbots answer customer questions, but they can't set up a meeting.
• An scheduling tool can book time with a customer, but it can't advise her on optimizing her time.

The opportunities and problems you face every day require a different technological approach — one that blends all relevant capabilities into a seamless, autonomous solution.

That's what agentic AI does. The term describes any software that combines multiple capabilities to solve a problem for you without you needing to manage them.

In this way, agentic AI is the opposite of traditional software, which typically requires human intervention to make things happen.

Here are some specific examples of how agentic AI is improving customer experience in financial services:

• AI financial advisors can analyze a customer's entire financial situation, taking into account their assets, liabilities, and financial goals. Then they can automate improvements by, for example, investing surplus cash, negotiating lower rates on loans, or maximizing points on spending.
• Agentic AI for conversation can tightly integrate various capabilities to facilitate complex human-to-human communication, such as resolving problems or negotiating agreements.
• AI-driven customer insights, such as automatically segmenting customers based on their behaviors and needs, can help firms personalize outreach without needing marketing teams to design and launch specific campaigns for each segment.

These use cases show that agentic AIs can handle increasingly complex tasks customers expect from financial services.

Benefits of agentic AI for financial services customers in 2025

Forrester's research shows that agentic AIs will account for 75% of customer-facing software by 2025.

The financial services industry's rapid transition to agentic AI will yield enormous benefits for customers, including:

1. AI-driven hyper-personalization. A single agentic AI can integrate a customer's financial data, goals, and behavior to optimize their entire financial situation without requiring them to switch between apps and services.
2. Always-on support. Chatbots already provide 24/7 presence, but agentic AIs will expand this to fully automated support that can manage complex issues autonomously without human intervention.
3. Proactive service. While most financial services firms wait for customers to come to them, agentic AIs can reach out when they observe that a customer's situation can be improved (like if they notice that a customer is spending too much on a loan).

The point is: the more capabilities an AI has, the more proactive it can be about improving a customer's situation or solving their problem.

And these are just a handful of the benefits that customers can expect in 2025 and beyond.

Challenges of implementing agentic AI in financial services

Even though agentic AI offers substantial advantages for financial firms, there are still barriers to its implementation.

1. Technical complexity. Making a highly capable AI that can handle complex tasks independently is an incredibly ambitious technical challenge that's taken companies like Google over a decade to accomplish.
2. Regulatory hurdles. Regulators might be cautious about allowing financial firms to automate complex tasks for customers, especially if there's a chance things could go wrong (e.g., a wealth manager selling someone unsuitable financial products).
3. Shift in operating model. Agentic AIs require firm leaders to rethink how they might be organized tomorrow, recalibrating team structures, roles, and responsibilities.

For these reasons, many financial firms will delay adopting agentic AI until its benefits become too compelling to ignore. But while some will drag their feet, others will sprint ahead, assuming first-mover advantages that will be hard for latecomers to overcome.

The future of banking with agentic AI

Imagine walking into a bank branch where every employee has an agentic AI working beside them. The AI performs all the time-consuming tasks that eat into the human employees' working days, such as preparing reports, sending emails, and organizing their calendars.

In this reality, agentic AI isn't replacing human employees. Instead, it's augmenting their capabilities so they can focus on the work that truly matters: engaging with customers and solving their problems.

This future won't be limited to the banking industry. Other professional services, such as consulting and law, will also be transformed by agentic AI.

And it's all coming in 2025.

Understanding how the nature of business technology will shift under the weight of agentic AI is crucial for firm leaders in every industry.