Banks brace for AI agents reshaping risk management

The rise of autonomous AI systems is forcing financial institutions to rethink their approach to risk management, technology leaders said during the recent Evident AI Symposium in New York.

“If you talk to your CISOs, trying to find some security vulnerability today is already somewhat of a needle in a haystack,” said Al Slamecka, global financial services industry lead for cloud and AI infrastructure at Cisco, during a livestreamed panel.

“We’re going to be moving to needles in tens of thousands of haystacks.”

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in workflows, the balance between innovation and protection grows increasingly delicate.

Financial firms are eager to tap into AI’s value, but the potential for operational disruption is rising just as fast. From cybersecurity blind spots to the complexity of managing change at scale, the risks are mounting.

“Agentic AI that’s implemented in a way that creates workflows and works with other agents exposes any vulnerabilities you might have in your basic risk management structures,” said Pinar Kip, executive vice president and CIO of international risk, governance, and transformation at State Street.

That risk is already reshaping how businesses allocate resources. IT leaders spent about 37% more time managing AI-related risks in 2025 than they did a year earlier, according to a OneTrust report released in September.

Nearly all of those leaders plan to boost governance spending by an average of 24% next year.

The financial services sector is leading this shift. New AI use cases launched by 50 of the world’s largest financial institutions doubled in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024, while the number of technologists developing agentic AI systems grew more than tenfold, according to an Evident Insights report published in August.