Defining Agentic AI
What is going to happen in 2026?
Half of the articles that appear in this magazine, the Spring 2026 edition of Financial IT, are devoted in some way to agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI).
These articles otherwise cover a huge variety of topics. Among others, these topics include payments, fraud detection, boosting the lifetime value of banking customers, modernisation of legacy systems and the strategic challenges posed by financial institutions’ adoption of AI.
This implies that, for now, there is no single and universally accepted definition of agentic AI. For now, though, we concur with the view of one of our contributors that agentic banking is ‘where AI doesn’t just respond, it executes. Autonomous agents can authenticate users, retrieve context, initiate workflows, orchestrate decisions across systems and complete tasks within defined compliance guardrails.’
Making all this work in practice will undoubtedly be difficult. As another of our contributors notes: ‘There is a major
