Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
How PhD-Level AI Agents Will Change Financial Services
Innovation | Sep 16, 2024
Image: Freepik
Why Platforms like Salesforce Are All In on AI Agents with Advanced Reasoning and Automation
With the release of OpenAI's o1 model, known as "Strawberry", AI just received a serious upgrade to it's intelligence. The o1 model goes beyond basic pattern recognition like earlier models (GPT-4, which seemingly just came out the other day), and is intended to handle sophisticated reasoning problems. This capacity for PhD or doctorate-level thinking is anticipated to have significant impact on most industries but specifically financial services. As the technology edges closer to going beyond human cognitive thinking, imagine what's possible with PhD reasoning when combined with automation and human-touch where required.
See: Australia Announces 10 Voluntary Responsible AI Guardrails
Autonomous AI agents are quickly taking centre stage and the implications are game-changing. Last week, Salesforce, a leading global cloud-based provider of CRM solutions launched Agentforce, an AI-powered platform that can autonomously handle complicated tasks in sales, marketing, and customer support (in addition to providing assistance with answering common questions). With its integration of consumer data and the latest reasoning engines, this technology has the potential to revolutionize the financial services industry in areas such as risk management, customer service, and compliance.
ChatGPT’s Strawberry
The o1 model is based on OpenAI's Strawberry reasoning engine where AI is moving away from standard models that recognize and predict patterns to a more advanced engine capable of carrying out nuanced and complicated, multi-step reasoning on its own. This is accomplished with a technique called 'reinforcement learning' or 'chain of thought' where problems are broken down and analyzed step by step, which is closer to how human brains process and work.
To put this into perspective, Strawberry scored 83% success compared to GPT-4's 13% on the International Mathematics Olympiad test. It can even spell the word strawberry, which prior LLM models have struggled (no joke).
AI Agents in Financial Services
Use cases are becoming more powerful with systems like Salesforce's Agentforce where businesses can create and manage sophisticated, self-governing agents that can handle a range of responsibilities, such as risk analysis and customer support automation, examine enormous databases, and act on decided outcomes that previously needed human intervention.
See: Responsible AI in Finance: CFTC’s New Framework
Some examples of AI agents in financial services include:
- Risk Management - PhD-level bots can evaluate financial markets, assess risks in real time, and make accurate forecasts. Agents can automatically alter investment portfolios based on current market data, reducing risks during volatile periods.
- Customer Service - Traditional chatbots are limited, but AI agents can communicate with clients using natural language processing and with access to massive databases can tailor financial advice, answer complicated questions, and even launch a loan application automatically.
- Regulatory Compliance - Agents can monitor regulatory changes, check internal data for compliance issues, and provide real-time reports which is essential with the growing complexities of international rules and increased regulatory scrutiny.
- Sales and Lead Nurturing - AI sales agents can foster and maintain client relationships, reply to questions, and even close sales transactions autonomously. Automating the sales process frees up human agents to focus on strategic planning and client interaction.
- Fraud Detection - Agents monitor transactional data across different channels for abnormalities looking for fraud, improving security. They will flag potential risks quicker than traditional methods.
Impactful Benefits
First, increased efficiency will be achieved by automating repetitive tasks, such as data entry, compliance checks, and customer service inquiries. This frees up human staff to focus on strategic initiatives like innovation. It also reduces labour costs and helps institutions deliver quicker responses and make timely decisions.
See: Prompt Injection Attacks in Slack’s AI Integration
Second, better accuracy is achieved by using sophisticated AI models, such as OpenAI's Strawberry, reducing mistakes and hallucinations. These agents can create more reliable insights and data, making them particularly useful in high-risk sectors such as investment management.
Third, scalability is an important feature of AI agents. Salesforce's ambitious goal of deploying one billion AI agents by 2025 highlights how these technologies may be expanded across sectors.
Collaborative AI
AI agents are not going to completely replace humans, despite their capabilities. Instead humans and bots will collaborate to boost productivity and innovation. People will focus on creativity, strategy, and oversight while bots can do all of the labour and data intensive heavy lifting.
See: AI Leaders and White House Discuss Energy Infrastructure
Also in situations where human judgment is paramount, such as a moral decision, AI and human collaboration is essential. Given the trust and sensitivity issues around financial services, finding the right balance between advanced automation and human skill is where the future of AI is headed in financial services (for now).
Outlook
The future of financial services will be defined by the collaboration between AI agents and human knowledge. Financial institutions and fintechs that adopt these AI-driven agents will have a competitive edge over lagging banks that prefer a wait and see approach.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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