Finance Industry Surpasses Regulators in AI Adoption

New research shows the finance sector leading regulatory authorities in adopting artificial intelligence (AI).

Financial services companies are “far ahead of regulators in adoption and deep adoption of AI,” said the report issued Tuesday (April 28) by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

“The scale and pace of AI adoption in financial services is genuinely remarkable – 4 in 5 firms are already deploying AI at some level, agentic systems have crossed into the mainstream and real productivity and profitability gains are being felt across the industry, although unevenly,” said Bryan Zhang, the center’s executive director.

As for regulators, 48% of the regulators surveyed said they were “still in the ‘exploring’ stage for AI adoption” or not engaged with AI at all.

The report found that software engineering is the “most mature” AI application in the financial sector and is a primary cyber risk transmission vector, with 48% of respondents flagging adversarial AI as a primary concern.

The center said this is underlined by Anthropic’s claim that its Mythos model is often more capable than humans when it comes to hacking, which makes manual oversight of AI use in financial services problematic, the center added.

Complicating matters is a “notable perception gap,” the report said. AI vendors put less emphasis than industry and regulators on adversarial AI threats, something mentioned by 50% of industry respondents and 57% of regulators, but only 35% of vendors.

The same held true for the issue of cyber/operational resilience: 32% of vendors mentioned it, compared to 46% for industry and 59% among regulators.

“These intersecting vulnerabilities can also feed into the top perceived risk across all stakeholders – data privacy and protection (73% of respondents) as sensitive data is typically the primary target for the cyber exploits these vulnerabilities enable,” the report added.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about increasing levels of AI adoption among retailers as AI agents play a greater role in commerce.

“Agentic artificial intelligence’s first real test in commerce may come not as a flashy shopping tool, but as a trust exercise that could decide who leads the next phase of digital payments growth,” the report said.

PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 45% of consumers would be comfortable letting AI agents complete purchases on their behalf, while 43% of retailers are piloting autonomous AI.

The research found that 95% of consumers report at least one concern about agentic commerce, with half saying they would trust agentic commerce more if they knew fraud protections were in place.