Findings from the KPMG Global AI Pulse survey offer a snapshot of how companies around the world are investing in and realising value from AI and agent implementation.
The survey also offers insight into the business implications of this transformation and the impact it is having on workforce, governance and risk management.
According to the sector analysis from the survey, financial services firms show strong deployment across functions, but orchestration is limited by regulatory and compliance constraints.
Twenty-seven percent of financial services organisations surveyed are scaling AI across the enterprise, while 59 percent report meaningful business value, with AI already embedded across core domains including fraud detection, underwriting, credit risk and customer operations.
Agentic systems are starting to emerge, with 10 percent of respondents deploying AI agents and 18 percent of firms scaling them across functions, supporting decision-making and workflow automation.
Sixty-one percent of firms in the sector report readiness to manage AI risks, reflecting the complexity of operating within highly regulated environments. Workforce readiness also remains a limiting factor, with only 16 percent very confident in their ability to support AI-enabled execution.
The financial services sub-sectors are evolving along distinct paths. Wealth and asset management are prioritising decision augmentation and personalisation, where explainability is critical.
Commercial banking is focused on operational efficiency, risk management and integration across legacy systems.
The insurance sector is reportedly using AI to design frictionless customer experiences across claims and underwriting, with a focus on customisation and speed.
Globally and across eight sectors, the survey finds that while 64 percent of organisations cite AI as already delivering meaningful business outcomes, they face growing challenges, from measuring and quantifying value to adapting governance models at the required speed, managing data privacy and cyber risks, and addressing workforce resistance.
These risks and challenges are keeping many global organisations in the experimentation and piloting stage of AI implementation, while only 11 percent are gaining an edge through AI agent deployment, scaling across functions and beginning to coordinate them across workflows.
With AI moving into the core of business operations, governance has been elevated and is considered integral to scaling responsibly and earning stakeholder trust.
Russell Kelly (pictured), Head of Advisory at KPMG in the Crown Dependencies, said: “Local organisations will find these statistics a useful benchmark for their own AI transformation journeys, and specifically, the findings relating to AI adoption in financial services firms mirrors what we see in the local sector.
“Organisations across our islands will need to overcome a distinct set of barriers to unlock its full potential, balancing innovation with regulatory expectations and limited local scale.”
