The trend: AI firms are rapidly upgrading their flagship banking and financial services capabilities. This includes recent releases from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity that are increasingly designed for commercial use and integrated with more enterprise data suppliers. xAI has announced no such releases but is trying to expand its services as it scrambles to compete effectively:

• Perplexity just announced upgrades to financial tools, including a feature that aggregates and analyzes personal investment account data.
• OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT tools for financial services, including integrations for Excel and several financial data platforms.
• Anthropic released plug-ins last month for Claude, developed with LSEG, Salesforce, and DocuSign.
• xAI is recruiting expert financial services practitioners—including bankers, analysts, traders, and portfolio managers—to train its models.

Zoom out: Banks are steadily adopting AI tools, forging partnerships with AI firms, and developing their own resources. Relatively narrow uses for AI have shown meaningful results. For example, Fifth Third COO Tim Spence recently said 40% of code released in January and February was written by AI tools. And KeyBank CEO Christopher Gorman said during Q4 2025 earnings that AI had cut call center costs by 97%.

Implications for banks: There is a wide gulf between adopting general-purpose genAI tools and forging an enterprise AI strategy: More than piecemeal adoption requires a strategic case, a tactical plan, and the talent to support both. Sophisticated banks are embedding AI increasingly further into their organizations:

• Goldman Sachs is working with Anthropic on custom AI agents for trade reconciliation and client onboarding.
• BNY will integrate Google Gemini Enterprise into its in-house AI platform to enable an internal research tool for employees.
• JPMorgan Chase is spending $2 billion per year on AI, realizing the same amount in savings, and has 2,000 people working on it.

But banks of all sizes have places to start. The rapid evolution of general-purpose AI tools to incorporate tasks designed for software development and financial services mean financial institutions can increase their productivity. No AI strategy is required to use widely available tools.