The financial services industry is adopting artificial intelligence rapidly, propelling it further into the sphere of cloud-service providers. 

No longer just a “nice-to-have,” AI is necessary for delivering smarter, faster and more personalized financial experiences, Dave Harden, chief technology officer at $4.8 billion Green Dot, told Bank Automation News.

“To unlock [AI’s] full potential, organizations need the flexibility and scale that cloud infrastructure provides,” Harden said. “Those investing in cloud computing are now better positioned to be nimble, able to ingest, process and act on the vast amounts of data feeding into AI models, and to deploy AI-driven insights in real time.” 

The development and deployment of AI is tied directly to a financial institution’s adoption of cloud computing, Harden said. 

All major AI models are running on cloud infrastructure and being provided by tech giants Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft, Pierre Buhler, managing director of the financial services practice at consultancy SSA, told BAN.  

AI is “really is an added service to cross-sell [tech providers’] core offering, which is the cloud,” he said. 

The computing power required to run AI models can be accomplished at scale on the cloud because tech giants have historically invested in large data centers, Buhler said. Adding AI is just “another way of dragging existing clients deeper into the cloud ecosystem.” 

Growing cloud revenues

The major cloud providers have seen their revenue surge on the back of growing AI adoption. 

“Our AI infrastructure investments are crucial to meeting the growth and demand from cloud customers,” Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on July 31. 

Google is moving toward embedding its agentic AI models into its cloud offerings for seamless access for clients, Pichai said. 

Google Cloud revenues increased 32% year over year to $13.6 billion in Q2, reflecting growth in the Google Cloud Platform across core and AI products, according to the earnings report. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft reported cloud revenue of $46.7 billion, up 27% YoY, and Amazon Web Services reported revenue of $30.9 billion, up 17% YoY, according to their earnings reports. 

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