Citi Launches 5,000-Person AI Agent Pilot Programme

Citigroup has announced a significant pilot programme testing autonomous AI agents across 5,000 employees, marking a major step towards transformational workplace automation in financial services.

Context and Background

The banking giant will deploy “agentic” capabilities within its proprietary AI platform, Citi Stylus Workspaces, allowing staff to direct AI tools to complete multiple interconnected tasks through a single prompt. Chief Technology Officer David Griffiths explained that users can now instruct the system to research clients, build comprehensive profiles from both public and internal data sources, and translate results into foreign languages—all autonomously.

The pilot represents a departure from previous AI implementations that required manual intervention at each step. Griffiths noted that whilst earlier AI models could perform agent-like functions, they lacked the reliability and tool-invocation capabilities that current models possess, making this advancement particularly significant for enterprise deployment.

The platform utilises multiple AI models including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, demonstrating the multi-vendor approach increasingly adopted by large financial institutions seeking robust AI capabilities.

Looking Forward

The four to six-week pilot will focus on measuring user adoption patterns, impact assessment, and cost-to-value ratios as the bank evaluates broader deployment. Griffiths acknowledged that whilst current tasks complete within minutes, longer-running autonomous processes could fundamentally alter workforce dynamics and capacity planning.

The implementation includes built-in cost controls to manage the potentially expensive nature of agent-based AI operations, though Griffiths noted that rapidly declining model costs make precise ROI calculations challenging. This pilot positions Citi amongst the financial services leaders exploring how AI agents might reshape traditional banking operations and workforce structures.

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