Each year for the past four consecutive cycles, Evident AI — a firm that tracks the technology sector — has published rankings that assess banks and other financial institutions across dimensions including AI-related talent pools, innovation activity, executive leadership, and disclosure practices. JPMorgan Chase held onto its leading position among banking institutions in the latest rankings.
Where Evident's assessment placed the institution at the top of the field in both workforce size and technology investment, the scores it recorded outpaced what those two resource advantages, taken on their own, would have been expected to produce. Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-CEO and co-founder of Evident, described the organisation's approach to artificial intelligence as one that spans every corner of its structure — covering 22 lines of business and 10 functions — with infrastructure designed to put AI tools within reach of all staff, calling that breadth of rollout a considerable undertaking.
Pointing to the institution's position as an early entrant in the space, Mousavizadeh noted that this timing had worked in its favour. The organisation has directed substantial resources toward technology, and a company representative described its day-to-day focus as centred entirely on transforming how work gets done. Efforts to bring down the expense of delivery are under way.
Mousavizadeh noted that Capital One has long maintained a well-developed AI platform architecture, while RBC pursues its line-of-business rollout, platform construction, and infrastructure build with a pace and intensity that Mousavizadeh described as unrelenting. Wells Fargo advanced one position in this year's standings, moving from sixth to fifth. Citigroup advanced four spots in the rankings, moving from twelfth place up to eighth. Bank of America's standing shifted three places, from tenth position to seventh. Morgan Stanley shed four places from its ranking, sliding back to ninth position.
Mousavizadeh noted that banks outside the top tier tend to run periodic deployments and adopt copilot tools, yet their underlying platform architecture leaves them without the foundation needed to operate at genuine breadth and pace — a combination that, in Mousavizadeh's view, defines where the industry's attention is concentrated this year. A flexible platform design allows an organisation to deploy smaller language models where they fit best and reserve more capable frontier options — such as Fable or Astra — for tasks that demand them; Mousavizadeh described routing logic that automatically assigns the appropriate model to each task as a way to hold down expenses, adding that the most advanced banks have already moved in that direction, while those that have not are at risk of falling behind institutions that have.
Mousavizadeh noted that major banks have spent the current year constructing what the industry calls "harnesses" around agentic AI — the guardrails and oversight mechanisms needed before such systems can be deployed responsibly — while Evident's data recorded a 21% rise in "enablement talent," meaning the engineers who build those control frameworks, a shift Mousavizadeh attributed to institutions recognising a growing need for engineers capable of handling increasingly intricate system design.
Mousavizadeh noted that the financial institutions committing the most resources to AI technology were also expanding their workforces at the fastest rate, with no reduction in software engineering positions detected across the banking sector and no measurable effect on overall staff numbers tied to those AI investments. Banks deploying AI tools have cut corporate client onboarding from a process that once stretched across six months down to roughly six days, a shift Mousavizadeh noted translates directly into earlier revenue generation.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating both the pace of research and the speed of product delivery across investment banking, and an executive noted that banks are increasingly orienting their performance targets around metrics such as revenue per head, market share expansion, customer experience on the retail side, and the time taken to bring new clients on board — all reflecting a broader shift toward growth-oriented priorities. Rivalry among banks for dominance in artificial intelligence has intensified, even as the country's largest institutions have held an advantage in that space for roughly four years.
Provisional authorisation from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has been extended to both Nubank and Revolut. OpenAI and Anthropic, both at the forefront of AI development, have moved into financial products, putting them in direct competition with established players in that space.
Leimer noted that smaller banks stand to gain access to AI tools through their vendors and platform providers over time, though the gap separating them from larger institutions will likely widen before it narrows, as industry leaders push toward agentic workflows that depend on vast proprietary data sets. Leimer added that community-focused institutions targeting specific, high-friction customer pain points — where personalised human service remains their strongest differentiator — could deploy AI to deepen and inform those interactions rather than replace them with generic automated responses, rather than attempting to match the research and development budgets of the largest banks.
