New research from OvationCXM reveals customer AI agents are moving into financial workflows, creating a new interaction channel across banking and commerce.
OvationCXM, the orchestration operating system for financial services, today released AI Agents: From Experiment to Execution, new research revealing that finance leaders have moved from experimenting with AI agents to using them in their finance workflows, and they plan to incorporate them further into banking and commerce work over the next 12 months.
The survey of 520 U.S. finance leaders found that 75% actively use AI agents or are piloting or testing them today in at least one finance or banking workflow. As adoption expands, finance leaders expect their AI agents to move beyond internal tasks and information retrieval to initiate instructions and transactions with their financial institutions.
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Key findings include:
- 75% are already using or testing AI agents. Finance teams report active use, pilots or testing across finance and banking workflows.
- Customer AI agents are already touching banking. Three of the top six finance workflows using AI agents involve banking, including transaction tracking, payment approvals and payment or transfer initiation.
- 68% expect their AI agents to transact. In the next 12 months, finance leaders plan to use AI agents for read-only, instruct, and transact tasks, with 28% expecting to use AI agents for ACH payments and 23% for wire transfers.
- 54% would find a workaround if their bank can’t support their AI agents. Among finance leaders already using AI agents, 54% would find an internal or third-party workaround and 15% would move banking business.
“Customer AI agents are rapidly becoming the next banking channel,” said Alfred “Chip” Kahn, founder and CEO of OvationCXM. “The opportunity for banks is to lead this shift by becoming the trusted gateway for how those agents interact with their systems. That means knowing whose agent is making the request, what it is allowed to do and when a human needs to be in the loop.”
The research also shows finance leaders are not asking for unrestricted AI autonomy. Their top confidence-building requirements center on permissions and limits, the ability to suspend or revoke agent access, real-time visibility, audit and reconciliation history and identity verification. When human approval is part of the process, finance leaders are nearly as willing to let their agents initiate or advance transact-level banking tasks as read-only activities, 50% compared with 54%.
“If a bank can’t support its customers’ AI agents, those customers will find another way to get the work done, either with their bank or somewhere else,” Kahn said. “The risk is that more of the customer experience moves to a competitor or outside the bank. Banks need to establish this control point now as the channel takes shape.”
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