Citizens Bank aims to deploy technology that will allow AI agents to plan, work and make decisions with minimal human oversight.

Citizens is working with software vendor UiPath, which at its annual product conference in October announcement new agentic AI tools as part of its automation technology suite. The new capability combines AI agents, robots, people and models to expand the reach and impact of automation efforts, according to the company.

Matt Lavoie, senior vice president of enterprise automation development at Citizens, said the bank plans to integrate some of the AI ​​models developed by Citizens’ in-house experts with UiPath’s automation software .

“Today we’re sorting through the work,” Lavoie said in an interview at UiPath’s annual conference in Las Vegas in October. “Agentic AI would figure out what to do, much like people do today.”

Citizens is one of the first to use AI agents to unlock business value. An emerging trend, adoption on enterprise platforms is set to take off quickly, according to Gartner. By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of daily business decisions to be made autonomously, according to the research firm.

Citizens are already using automation without AI. For example, the bank uses automation to sort emails and distribute them to teams for action. Agentic AI will help determine the right action to take, and then potentially pass that decision to automation software, which will manage that action.

Bots typically automate repetitive, rules-based tasks, but agents can adapt to changes, make decisions along the way, and manage more complex processes.

“We are advancing enterprise automation with agents (AI), enabling customers to automate complete end-to-end processes and orchestrate workflows seamlessly. The result is more substantial business results, greater productivity, and more direct benefits from automation to customers. ” said Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath, in a statement.

Agentic AI and automation

Despite the potential of AI agents, Citizens is not about to let AI agents run wild: humans will ensure that agents complete their tasks effectively as use cases develop.

“Our plan is to keep humans informed until we can really prove that it’s 100 percent effective,” Lavoie said. The initial focus will be on internal, non-customer-facing use cases.

Citizens began its automation journey seven years ago. It currently has more than 550 automations operating in its environment, doing the work of about 700 employees every day, Lavoie said. The bank has focused its automation efforts on operations, including back-office activities.

“We have many use cases that require massive updates to systems,” he said. Examples include loan servicing and automation that allows customers to quickly take advantage of promotional rates.

Citizens also uses automation to manage its syndicated loan portfolio mailbox. Using this technology, the bank has gone from seven full-time colleagues managing a mailbox seven years ago to just one person who now spends half their time managing the mailbox, Lavoie said.

Opportunities and risks of AI agents

AI agents have the potential to help banks and other businesses gain efficiencies and save money through their investments in large language models, according to American Banker. reported last month. Like citizens, banks that deploy agentic capabilities typically have a human in the loop to review the model’s work and detect any problems. hallucinations, errors or bias in its exit.

But this is likely to evolve over time. Data from Capgemini clients who have implemented agentic AI shows that “we’re getting to a point where they feel comfortable enough to let an AI agent make some decisions without a human in the middle,” he said. said Kartik Ramakrishnan, Deputy Managing Director of Financial Services at Capgemini. in a recent podcast on American Banker.

Banks are early in their efforts to deploy agentic AI in production. Amin Kermali, vice president of enterprise digitalization and automation at TD Bank, another UiPath client, recently told SiliconANGLE that automation and AI can generate “tremendous business value”.

“We see that bringing these capabilities together puts us on a path to unlocking exponential potential, transforming the way we work and truly future-proofing the bank,” he said, noting that the bank is working to identify use cases that would benefit from the combined power of automation and AI.

“I see that we will quickly get to a point where we have a unified operating and automation model and ecosystem for AI. I think this path to agentic (is) where we can really start to unleash all the power,” he said. said.

Tampa-based Suncoast Credit Union also said it is exploring agentic AI capabilities that could be unleashed, including cases where an agent can make decisions that humans typically have to handle, Michael Parks said. senior vice president and CIO.

Agentic AI’s capabilities could include “more actionable elements, and where it can start to process and think for itself and make decisions”, allowing the agent to act autonomously, e.g. in processing mortgage loans, he said.