Artificial intelligence in financial services has largely been measured through familiar metrics such as cost reduction, faster processing and automation.However, TAINA Technologyargues that the emergence of agentic AI could deliver a much broader transformation, particularly across complex tax and operations functions.
According to TAINA’s Maria Scott, years of working with tax and operations teams have highlighted that the biggest challenge is not a lack of expertise. Instead, financial institutions often operate within structures that have become fragmented as regulatory requirements, data dependencies and increasingly complex workflows have grown.
These operating models were designed to provide control and consistency, but can leave processes, data and institutional knowledge spread across different teams and systems. As a result, organisations can become reactive, identify problems late and depend on individual employees to connect gaps between workflows.
Agentic AI could provide an opportunity to rethink this model. Rather than simply automating individual tasks, organisations could use AI to coordinate skills, technology and expertise around specific objectives. This would allow teams and resources to be assembled dynamically depending on the problem being addressed, rather than relying exclusively on fixed departmental structures.
For financial institutions, however, greater autonomy also increases the importance of governance. Agentic AI cannot operate as an uncontrolled black box in regulated environments. Systems need appropriate security, auditability, oversight and quality controls built into their design. As concerns around cybersecurity, data integrity and AI-driven decision-making increase, the ability to demonstrate that AI systems operate responsibly could become increasingly important.
One of the less obvious opportunities is the creation of organisational memory. Much of the knowledge required to handle complex financial and tax processes remains with individual employees, including their understanding of unusual cases, previous decisions and exceptions. That expertise can be difficult to scale and may disappear when employees leave.
Agentic AI could instead capture knowledge through interactions, validations and exception handling, allowing it to be reused across future workflows. Over time, this could create a compounding effect. Better data quality at the point of capture could reduce downstream remediation, while more consistent decisions could strengthen auditability and reduce the need to repeatedly resolve the same issues.
The impact could also extend to employees. By taking on repetitive work, AI could allow professionals to spend more time on judgement, analysis and strategic activities. This shifts the focus from replacing people towards enabling them to work at a higher level.
Scott identifies several areas where financial institutions can begin exploring this approach. These include embedding specialist knowledge into systems, moving validation earlier in workflows, designing processes around outcomes rather than functions and targeting high-friction activities such as onboarding and remediation.
The underlying argument is that agentic AI should not be viewed simply as a faster way of completing existing tasks. Its greater potential lies in changing how financial institutions structure work, preserve knowledge and make decisions.
For TAINA Technology, that means the return on agentic AI could ultimately be measured not only through efficiency gains, but through stronger organisational memory, improved controls and more adaptive operating models.
Investors
The following investor(s) were tagged in this article.
