How AI Is Rewriting How Banks Work

The most important banking question about AI may no longer be where it can save time. It may be what happens to roles, skills, and decision-making once institutions start rebuilding work around it. A recent ProSight conversation with bank and industry leaders suggests those changes could run deeper than simple automation. 

A few themes stand out: 

The first gains are showing up in the middle and back office. Til Schuermann, global head of finance and risk at Oliver Wyman, said “AI has penetrated the middle and back office” in striking ways. In anti-money laundering alone, he said, banks are seeing a “30–50% reduction in customer due diligence [CDD] review volumes and a 60–80% reduction in false positives in transaction monitoring.” At 1st Source Bank, CEO Andrea Short said early work has also focused on internal data and operations, including “operational efficiencies in the back office.” 

People are moving up the value chain. Susan LaMonica, chief human resources officer at Citizens Bank, said, “We are really rewriting in very basic ways how work gets done.” In compliance and operations, she said, that could mean moving people away from manual review and toward investigation, escalation, and judgment. That is a meaningful distinction. The long-term value is not just in doing current tasks faster, but in redefining who handles what—and why. 

Revenue and relationships are part of the story, too. LaMonica said that while early efforts tend to focus on cost, “the longer-term opportunity is on the revenue side.” Isio Nelson, managing director of research, fraud, and thought leadership at ProSight, said AI can help bankers “better know their customers, be able to research them before they have their conversations, and have more information.” Schuermann added that with “AI supporting and helping the banker, those human-to-human interactions [with customers] can be made much richer and more personalized.” 

Curiosity and adaptability are becoming core capabilities. Short said, “We have to have people who are curious.” LaMonica added that the industry will need “people who can adapt and be flexible, who can change quickly, who thrive on change, and can learn quickly.” Michael Hsu, venture partner at Core Innovation Capital and former acting U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, also pointed to emerging roles such as “integrators, builders, and trust engineers.” 

Human judgment is still central. As AI blurs traditional lines and speeds up both progress and mistakes, the industry leaders kept returning to one idea: banks will still need people with judgment, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking. 

The takeaway: AI may automate more work, but the larger shift is in what banks ask humans to do. The institutions that adapt best may be the ones that treat AI not just as a technology investment, but as a workforce and leadership challenge, too.