When people talk about artificial intelligence in banking, the conversation tends to focus on back-office transformation: fraud detection, underwriting automation, call center deflection. It’s operational, cost-saving and quietly invisible to most customers.
But a recent EY and MIT Technology Review study showing that 70% of financial institutions are already deploying or piloting agentic AI (Agentic AI refers to systems that can autonomously perceive, decide and act toward goals, rather than just responding passively to prompts). This signals something deeper is underway. These AI systems don’t just assist. They learn, make contextual decisions and take action without direct human input.
For marketers and communicators in financial services, the implications aren’t theoretical. Agentic AI is already beginning to shape the customer experience. And when the experience changes, so must the message. This isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new era of brand behavior.
Unlike traditional automation, agentic AI has the ability to generate responses, adjust strategies and optimize engagement in real time. That might mean dynamically allocating media spend, personalizing customer journeys across channels, or adapting service scripts based on previous interactions. All without a person initiating the change.
On the surface, that sounds like a marketer’s dream: scale, speed and smart automation. But in high-trust, high-scrutiny sectors like banking, wealth and insurance, these systems also introduce new risks like tone missteps, regulatory overreach, opaque decision-making and erosion of message consistency. When an AI agent represents your brand in real time, brand governance stops being a downstream process and becomes infrastructure.
The challenge is that as marketing and PR professionals, we are rarely at the table when these systems are being designed. Too often, we’re looped in once the tech is built and then asked to provide copy, refine tone, or explain decisions we didn’t influence. But in the age of AI autonomy, that model doesn’t hold. The very systems shaping customer experiences are now writing the story in real time.So where should marketers focus their energy right now?
What to Prioritize in the Age of Agentic AI
Audit your message ecosystem. If AI will soon touch everything from email personalization to service responses, start by mapping what your brand is saying and how it’s being said across systems. Look for gaps in tone, inconsistencies in language and areas where automation is already creating disconnects.
Design your creative constraints. As more content becomes AI-generated or AI-assembled, your style guide isn’t enough. Develop brand-safe guardrails for tone, pacing, vocabulary, escalation triggers and even ethical boundaries. Developing these constraints will allow AI to scale your voice without distorting it.
Clarify your AI stance. Customers increasingly expect transparency and we frequently discuss how transparency grows trust. So, lean in and be clear about where, when and how automation is being used. You can build narratives that frame AI as a tool of support and empowerment, not replacement or surveillance. Create messages that will work for internal teams and for your external stakeholders and customers.
Prepare your team. Marketers don’t need to become data scientists, but they do need to speak the language of AI. That means understanding how prompts work, how to evaluate outputs and how to spot when an “efficient” decision is actually a brand liability.
Stay close to CX. Agentic AI doesn’t live in a vacuum. It’s already shaping customer journeys from the first touchpoint to customer service. Your brand is being interpreted through every interaction and marketing needs to play an ongoing role in designing those experiences.
None of this suggests AI should be feared. On the contrary, there’s enormous potential for creative experimentation, operational efficiency and deeper personalization. But the brands that win in this next phase won’t be the ones with the flashiest tools. They’ll be the ones who apply AI with purpose, guardrails and empathy.
The EY study rightly frames agentic AI as a shift from static systems to self-improving ones. That shift demands a different kind of marketing mindset. A mindset that’s less about controlling every output and more about designing the ecosystem AI operates in.
In that sense, marketers are no longer just campaign architects. We’re now experience stewards. We don’t just shape the message, we shape the mechanisms that deliver it and the values that guide it.
If AI is going to power the next generation of brand interactions, then marketing has to lead the conversation about how it shows up, what it says and how it makes people feel.
Because what customers will remember won’t be how fast or smart the system was.
They’ll remember whether it made them feel heard. And in financial services, that’s still the most valuable return on investment.