The top 50 banks around the world have deployed AI for 167 use cases to improve efficiency and drive consumer experience within their operations. 

Financial institutions including Melbourne, Australia-based ANZ, London-based NatWest, Zurich-based UBS, as well as Citi and JPMorgan in the United States are increasingly deploying AI for back office, middle office and front office operations as the technology becomes more accessible, Alexandra Mousavizadeh, chief executive of think tank Evident AI, told Bank Automation News. 

Low-risk applications 

“Most banks are focusing on things that are internally facing as they are low risk,” Mousavizadeh said. Internal applications for AI are “easiest to push through because you don’t have the regulatory pressures like you do have on things that are externally and customer facing.” 

According to Q1 2025 Use Case Trends report published Feb. 20 by Evident AI, the following FIs have deployed AI tools: 

• CommBank, to combat cyberattacks; 

• Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and UBS, as internal knowledge finding tools; 

• Citi, for coding assistance and compliance; and 

• ING and NatWest for customer assistance tools that keep a human in the loop. 

Additionally, $760 billion ANZ has deployed AI for coding assistance for 3,000 software engineers and built its own AI model, Z-GPT, which “allows staff to type in a simple question to the tool with an answer generated from data stored in various different internal systems,” a spokesperson told Bank Automation News. 

The biggest banks are looking to develop these AI solutions on their own rather than working with fintechs due to the sheer complexity of their operations, Mousavizadeh said, adding that banks absorb a lot of AI talent, and will increasingly continue to do so. 

ROI of AI 

Banks are still finding ways to quantify return on investment of AI as they continue to pour money into the technology, Mousavizadeh said. 

“It’s quite complicated to measure ROI for any business,” Mousavizadeh said, adding that multiple factors like revenue uplift, headcount change, customer satisfaction, efficiency gains and future expenses saved make it difficult to put one number to it. 

“Everyone is grappling a little bit about what the criteria is for calculating ROI is but large [banks are] starting to emerge with common ways to do this,” Mousavizadeh said. 

In the second half of 2024, banks’ priorities of AI deployment expanded from just gaining efficiency to generating revenue, Mousavizadeh said. 

According to the report, in the first half of 2024, nearly 80% of FIs were deploying AI to gain efficiency and only 10% were deploying it to make money, compared to 50% using the tech for efficiency and 20% using it for revenue generation purposes in the second half of the year. 

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