Senior leaders at major Indian banks are prioritising agentic AI development over the coming year, signalling a shift from experimentation towards autonomous decision-making, while emphasising the need for robust controls and data security.
Senior executives at some of India’s biggest lenders are treating agentic AI as a medium-to-high strategic priority over the next year, a sign that banks are moving beyond experimental use of artificial intelligence and towards systems that can take actions with less human prompting. At a banking and financial services conference in India, leaders from Bank of India, Canara Bank, Bank of Baroda, HDFC Bank and IndusInd Bank said the technology could reshape decision-making, security and product development, but only if it is built on strong controls and clear accountability.
Their comments come as India’s financial sector is still at an early stage of AI adoption. The Economic Survey 2025-26 said only 21% of banks and financial institutions have implemented or are developing AI solutions for core operations. The Reserve Bank of India’s FreeAI framework, published in August 2025, was designed to help the sector weigh both the opportunities and the risks, underscoring how much work remains before AI is fully embedded in mainstream banking.
The biggest concern among bankers is not ambition but trust. Anjani Rathor, group head for digital banking and customer experience at HDFC Bank, said data quality is central to making AI useful, arguing that models can only be as good as the information they are trained on. He said banks need tighter transaction monitoring so that systems work with current, relevant context rather than stale records, noting that outdated income data could lead to false risk flags. Rathor also said customer information should be tokenised to protect personally identifiable data, reflecting wider industry emphasis on privacy and security.
That caution is being matched by practical experimentation elsewhere in the payments ecosystem. Mastercard recently demonstrated India’s first fully authenticated agentic commerce transaction at the India AI Impact Summit, using a tokenised and authenticated payment flow inside an AI-powered interface. The demonstration involved cards issued by Axis Bank and RBL Bank, alongside payment partners including Cashfree Payments, Juspay, PayU and Razorpay, and merchant partners such as Swiggy, Vodafone Idea, Tira and Zepto. Elsewhere, SBI has said it plans to introduce agentic AI first for staff before extending it to customers, while Razorpay and Gnani.ai have launched a platform aimed at completing UPI payments during live customer calls. NPCI is also exploring agent-to-agent workflows to shorten UPI compliance cycles, showing that India’s push into autonomous AI is spreading beyond banks into the broader payments infrastructure.
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