Regulatory constraints and the handling of sensitive data are key reasons financial institutions are wary of investing in AI deployment at a large scale, but this may change as the cost for AI implementation drops.

Financial services providers are reluctant to invest in AI deployment, Isabelle Selles, senior editor and research analyst, said during CB Insights’ webinar, “The State of AI: Charting the Course from 2024 to 2025” on Feb. 11. “We see a lot of organizations piloting agents but not actually deploying them,” Selles said.

Falling costs an incentive

But as the cost to deploy AI agents drops, FIs may become more interested in increasing its deployment, Selles said, referencing a Feb. 9 blog post from OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

“The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use,” Altman wrote. “You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.”

Moore’s Law refers to the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost. The law is named after Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 predicted that transistors would double each year for the next 10 years.

While the cost of AI models was not specified, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro priced at $200 per month in December 2024.

The shrinking cost of AI usage and deployment will give fintech innovators a boost, Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and chief executive at think tank Evident Insights, told Bank Automation News.

A less expensive AI model “lowers the barriers for fintechs looking to build AI-driven products without being locked into expensive proprietary systems.”

— Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and CEO, Evident Insights

Rising use cases

Rather than introducing isolated pilots, deploying AI at scale in a centralized way allows FIs to maximize savings, Connor Loessl, associate partner for global banking and financial markets at IBM Consulting, told BAN.

As FIs look to optimize ROI, gen AI specifically is set to see an uptick in use this year, with nearly 80% of FIs estimated to opt for enterprisewide gen AI strategies compared to 8% in 2024, Loessl said.

Autonomous agents, or digital assistants, and gen AI for customer support are the fastest growing use cases for AI in major sectors, including financial services, according to CB Insights.

FIs that have recently implemented AI assistants include:

• $2 trillion Goldman Sachs, which last month rolled out an internal gen AI-driven employee assistant;
• $1.7 trillion Citi, which last month launched three gen AI tools to help bank employees with tasks such as document retrieval; and
• $5 billion credit union TruStone Financial, which in November integrated digital conversation platform developer Eltropy’s automated chatbot.

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