Most banks are overlooking the biggest opportunity artificial intelligence (AI) offers: unlocking new revenue and elevating the human judgment that drives it.
A follow the money philosophy is an excellent guide to maximizing AI’s impact. This means focusing on the areas that generate the most value and where better intelligence directly improves outcomes.
A Cash Cow and Tech Laggard
Commercial banking is the core revenue engine and the most under-innovated business line in the modern bank. Compared to retail customers, commercial clients deliver far more revenue per relationship, demonstrate greater stickiness and unlock meaningful cross-selling potential.
However, it’s recently become a crowded battlefield. Some national banks are deploying large teams while digital-first platforms are entering commercial banking. Customers expect more proactive, data-driven interactions than ever. Yet growth still depends almost entirely on people. This model cannot keep pace with the speed and complexity of today’s commercial market.
The strongest return on investment (ROI) comes from revenue generation. But many see AI as a productivity engine and a job killer and miss the opportunity to achieve long-term impact. There is a better path: one in which AI elevates human potential and adds to the bottom line.
The banks that win won’t be running more experiments — they’ll be redesigning work across the entire team.
Madhu Reddy, chief information officer of the $2.6 billion, Oak Brook, Illinois-based Republic Bank of Chicago, captured it perfectly, “Transformations become meaningful only when business leaders own the outcomes, and technology leaders co-design roles where humans and AI work in tandem. The CIO’s job is no longer about running systems — it’s about architecting how people, data and intelligence come together to deliver results.”
Reimagining Relationship Banking
AI can now do the tasks that never relied on human judgment, such as scanning, organizing and assembling context. When that work disappears, relationship bankers can focus on meaningful conversations, prioritization and interpreting the nuance in client’s choices.
Their day involves staying close to business clients to pursue wallet share. The work is slowed by fragmented information: critical signals that are hidden in core systems, unstructured text and external data sources, leaving only enough capacity to react to inbound issues or prioritize select accounts. Despite their skill and judgment, they’re forced to work with incomplete information, limiting ability to be proactive and achieve impact across the full portfolio.
That dynamic changes when adding a network of intelligent agents that gather, correlate and interpret everything bankers should know but can miss. Agentic AI platforms draw from internal banking systems and blend them with external signals to produce actionable situational awareness. This is intelligence, not automation, that reveals patterns, opportunities and risks, and provides contextual recommendations to refine judgment, allowing bankers to be proactive across the entire portfolio. They can anticipate financing needs, detect churn risk and surface cross-selling opportunities while being fully informed.
Banks are not pursuing this because AI is fashionable — they are doing it because they recognize the ceiling their relationship bankers have already hit. The question has shifted from, “What tasks can AI automate?” to “What would our bankers do if the noise disappeared?” That shift alone justifies the pilot.
Senior leaders don’t need a comprehensive business case. When a banker has deeper visibility into opportunity, risk and momentum across their portfolio, they create more revenue-producing conversations. They also want partners who can deliver value. As Izge Cengiz Ercan, director of strategic innovation at Valley National Bank, a subsidiary of the $63.0 billion Morristown, New Jersey-based Valley National Bancorp put it, “Partnerships are becoming really vital to keep up with the speed of change with AI. The best partnerships are nimble and willing to evolve with our specific needs.”
AI That Returns Banking to Relationships
When busy work disappears, judgment becomes the banker’s strongest asset. AI clears away the noise, the digging, the search for context, freeing time where it matters most: meaningfully engaging with clients.
Banking becomes what it was meant to be: informed conversations, trust and durable relationships. When every banker can operate this way, results are no longer driven just by a few high performers.
As Laurent Desmangles, former Boston Consulting Group senior partner and board member at leading banks, observes, “We are at the point where AI isn’t just taking work off the table — it is expanding what bankers are capable of. When routine tasks disappear, the banker’s strength isn’t speed or throughput; it’s judgment, timing and the ability to connect with clients in ways that create real momentum.”
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