• Agentic AI surged to the top of enterprise agendas in 2025. • Yet while enthusiasm was sky‑high, many organizations struggled to bridge the gap between vendor vision and the practical progress that business and technology leaders expected. • At Forrester, we’ve documented theevolution from deterministic workflows to “agentish” systemsand, ultimately, to fully agentic architectures. • Industries such as customer service and software development have moved fastest - but the financial services industry has often been mischaracterized as slow to adopt agentic. • That perception no longer holds. • Financial services firms are building agentic capabilities tailored to the sector’s unique demands for precision, compliance, auditability, and reliability.

Article Summaries:

  • Agentic AI is emerging as a key driver for change in financial services, moving beyond the deterministic workflows that dominated earlier years. Bloomberg’s new ASKB agent exemplifies this trend, offering a conversational front‑door to the Bloomberg Terminal that uses a multi‑agent architecture to retrieve and synthesize data across structured and unstructured content. While still “agentish”-primarily gathering information rather than acting autonomously-ASKB enables human‑agent collaboration, such as facilitating analysts’ follow‑ups with research authors. The industry faces a bottleneck in evaluating agentic systems, with costly human expertise versus the limitations of LLM‑based judges, suggesting a hybrid approach will be needed for reliable, compliant deployment.

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