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State Bank of India (SBI) will target customer engagement, employee productivity, and proactive risk management as its three core priorities for deploying agentic artificial intelligence across its network, said the Chairman, Challa Sreenivasulu Setty.
The public sector lender plans to use the emerging technology to deliver hyper-personalised services to customers, simplify internal operations for staff, and bolster institutional safeguards against systemic risks. Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Setty noted, "I think we will be focusing on three major areas in adoption of agentic AI: mainly on the customer engagement and hyper personalisation and the employee side how do we improve the productivity simplify the process and on the risk management side the proactive risk management deployment of agentic AI for that." When asked regarding the Foreign Currency Non-Resident (Bank) accounts, Setty observed, "I think everybody will be more responsible in lending. So it will take about three to four months for the deployment of the liquidity." Earlier, while addressing the gathering at Global Fintech Fest, Setty said that the institution is moving beyond conventional predictive tools toward autonomous technologies capable of taking independent actions. The transition represents a fundamental shift in banking operations, moving the sector from automated recommendations to autonomous execution. "Agentic AI, the next stage, can potentially move from assisting with a task or carrying out a defined set of tasks and beyond on behalf of a customer and in an institution. And how do we respond to changing circumstances with a degree of autonomy? That to me is the difference between a tool that we operate and a capability to which we delegate," Setty said. He explained that deploying autonomous agents across transaction cycles will strengthen loan appraisals, underwriting, KYC compliance, anti-money laundering checks, and fraud detection. "The real opportunity lies in deploying agents to areas where scale, speed, and judgment can materially strengthen the financial system," Setty stated. "These are not merely opportunities for automation. At India's scale, they can improve the quality of decisions, reduce response times, strengthen controls and make the financial system more resilient." Addressing operational safeguards, Setty outlined the "three A's framework: accuracy, accountability, and access without asymmetry, required to maintain institutional trust at a national scale. "An agent operating in financial services needs to be accurate. There is nothing like 99% accuracy here. You need to be 100% accurate and every time, all the time," he said. He added, "The moment AI moves from recommendation to execution, accountability becomes even more important. There must be an audit trail, traceability, and the ability to understand why an important action was taken." Setty also highlighted the operational need to expand traditional compliance frameworks to account for autonomous programs entering the financial ecosystem. "Banks have spent decades building robust processes about know your customer. As agents begin to participate in financial transactions, we will increasingly need to think about know your agent," Setty said. (ANI)
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