Benzinga Head of Product Tommy Cotter recently hosted a discussion at our flagship event, Fintech Day & Awards 2025, in New York. The panel, titled "AI In Finance: How Autonomous Agents are Changing Financial Services,” included participants who examined current use cases of agentic AI in fintech and the future of AI in the industry. 

Each guest expressed a strong expectation for greater AI-driven automation and augmentation in financial decision-making. 

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Perplexity

AJ Audino, head of enterprise growth for Perplexity, highlighted how AI has fundamentally changed information gathering. 

“Today, the ability to search at scale is profound. We’ve built our own web index, and you’re also able to connect different applications--Salesforce, Notion, Linear--and so the ability to gather this information is really impressive," Audino shared. 

Using AI, organizations can now efficiently access and aggregate critical data from a variety of applications, setting a new standard for operational intelligence.

Lava

Mitchel Jones, founder and CEO of Lava, presented agentic capabilities as a framework of "AAA" assist, advise, approve. 

Most fintech companies are still in the "assist" zone, Jones says. They use AI agents to speed up and enhance context. But, they’re still a long way from letting agents approve billion-dollar transactions or make decisions to offset fraud.

Domain Money

Multiple panel participants noted the same limits to AI's current abilities. 

“The idea that you can take a pile of documents and feed them to an LLM and get a cohesive response that you can rely on is really a fallacy. Now that may change a couple years down the road, but our approach has been to basically compartmentalize functions into discrete tasks," said Adam Dell, CEO of Domain Money. 

BMO Capital Markets

Armando Benitez, head of AI at BMO Capital Markets, described a modular approach to AI agents. 

“The way I like to think about agents is one entity that does one thing and one thing only really well. And then when you put them all together … you can solve a really complex problem,” Benitez said. 

Panel participants also emphasized the continued importance of human relationships and trust, especially in the financial industry. 

“It seems like every company that I speak with, you know, they don't want to rely solely on an AI produced artifact and they always want to see human in the loop," Dell said. 

There's more cutting edge ideas coming out of the Benzinga Fintech Day & Awards 2025. See more details here and watch for more coverage on Benzinga.com.

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