To determine where the financial services industry is headed relative to AI, it is imperative to remember where it has been. 

Industry experts at the FinAi Banking Summit in Denver last week discussed just that.

Speakers from KeyBank, Piermont Bank and Varo Bank kicked off the summit on Monday, March 2.  

Piermont and Varo have distinct approaches to AI since both were created on AI foundations, Wendy Cai-Lee, president and chief executive at Piermont, and Asmau Ahmed, chief AI and data officer at Varo, said. 

Varo is “AI-native,” Ahmed said, noting that the $432 million bank owns its data engineering, machine learning operations and decisioning layers. 

Meanwhile, $500 million Piermont is a cloud-native institution, Cai-Lee said, meaning it has “tech infrastructure that is flexible enough, scalable enough and potentially efficient enough to adopt new technology inclusive of AI.” 

However, being cloud-native or AI-first is not necessarily the norm for FIs.  

KeyBank is neither. The $187 billion bank recently celebrated its 200th anniversary, Mike Reynolds, business technology executive at Key, said at the summit. What comes along with such a milestone is a legacy infrastructure, but that doesn’t keep the bank from having AI ambitions – including the application of generative AI.  

All the FIs at the summit — First Citizens Bank, JPMorgan, Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, PNC, TD Bank and others — are approaching AI headfirst, but their paths are different.  

History of AI in finance

AI existed long before OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit the scene, Ned Carroll, head of data and automation at PNC, said, referencing the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. 

“It’s not new,” Carroll said. “It’s another wave of how we can automate work. It’s another wave of how we can get better insight.” 

In the past, AI was measured by the number of patents granted, growing investments and the number of use cases, he said. “Now … it’s time for the rubber to hit the road.” 

Notable AI efforts in the past five years include the following AI patents and use cases: 

• BNY had 117 AI tools in production in October 2025; 

• Capital One obtained 472 AI-related patents in 2024, up 14% year over year; and 

• One out of five of Bank of America’s 644 granted patents were AI- or ML-driven in 2023. 

The growing list of FIs that have adopted internal and client-facing chatbots includes:  

• Bank of America; 

• BankUnited; 

• Fifth Third Bank; and  

• MSUFCU. 

AI today

AI use cases now go well beyond traditional chatbots as FIs deploy the tech to:  

• Gain efficiency;  

• Speed transactions;  

• Perform mundane tasks; and 

• Write code. 

Leaders at the summit offered examples:  

• KeyBank and Varo Bank are training employees to write effective prompts for gen AI;  

• MSUFCU has prevented over $2.5 million in losses with AI authentication; and  

• JPMorgan Payments is using AI for fraud detection. 

The next 5 years

Bank leaders at the FinAi Banking Summit shared where they think AI is headed in the next five years. Their responses included: 

• Real-time communication;

• Management; 

• Personal agents; and 

• Agentic commerce. 

Summit attendees agreed that the key to successful increase in AI adoption will be leadership, commitment and data. 

• Piermont Bank’s CEO Cai-Lee said leadership needs to use AI to understand it. “I use it,” she said. “I want to know how it works.”
• First Citizens Bank’s Head of AI Ash Kaduskar said, “If you want to do [AI], do it well, do not do it timidly.”
• PNC’s Carroll said FIs must understand data, “it’s availability, it’s accessibility, its quality.” 

Adopting these tenets will help financial institutions build the foundation for nimble use of emerging technology. 

Read more coverage from FinAi Banking Summit here. Register for the upcoming FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas, here.