The sixth annual Nvidia State of Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services report, based on a survey of more than 800 industry professionals, finds that Artificial Intelligence usage across the sector has reached its highest level yet, with organizations scaling deployments across fraud detection, risk management, customer service, algorithmic trading and document processing. The report highlights that 65% of respondents said their company is actively using Artificial Intelligence, up from 45% in last year’s report, while 61% are using or assessing generative Artificial Intelligence, which is up 52% year over year. Agentic Artificial Intelligence is also gaining traction, with 42% of respondents using or assessing it and 21% saying they have already deployed Artificial Intelligence agents.
Open source has emerged as a cornerstone of institutions’ Artificial Intelligence strategies, both to accelerate development and to avoid vendor lock in. In the headline findings, 84% said open source models and software are important to their Artificial Intelligence strategy, and elsewhere in the report 83% percent of respondents said open source is important to their organization’s Artificial Intelligence strategy, with 43% saying it is very to extremely important. Industry voices argue that open source models allow banks to fine tune systems on proprietary transaction data and customer histories to create differentiated capabilities, while also noting that proprietary approaches can still deliver superior results for highly domain specific tasks.
Respondents reported strong and measurable business impact from production Artificial Intelligence systems, especially as firms move beyond proofs of concept. A total of 89% said Artificial Intelligence is helping increase annual revenue and decrease annual costs, and 64% of respondents said Artificial Intelligence has helped increase annual revenue by more than 5% including 29% who said revenue increased more than 10%. Similarly, 61% said Artificial Intelligence had helped decrease annual costs by more than 5%, with 25% saying costs decreased more than 10%. Operational efficiency was cited as the largest improvement by 52% of respondents, while 48% pointed to employee productivity, and experts highlighted payment operations and intelligent transaction routing as areas with particularly clear return on investment.
On the back of these results, institutions are planning to maintain or accelerate spending on Artificial Intelligence. Nearly 100% of respondents said their Artificial Intelligence budgets would increase or stay the same in the coming year, with about 41% saying investment would go toward optimizing Artificial Intelligence workflows and production, and 34% focusing on expanding Artificial Intelligence use cases. Another 30% said investment would focus on building or providing more access to Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, including on premises and cloud deployments. Artificial Intelligence agents are a key target for future rollouts, with about 21% of respondents saying Artificial Intelligence agents have already been deployed and another 22% saying Artificial Intelligence agents will be deployed within the next year and beyond, as firms increasingly treat proprietary data as a strategic asset for differentiated Artificial Intelligence products.
