Back to 2029: Meet your customer's AI agent

“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” —Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future

When Back to the Future Part II imagined 2015, it gave us flying cars, self-lacing shoes, and hoverboards. Today, we can envision a different future—one shaped by AI agents that act on our behalf.

Imagine a Tuesday morning in 2029. You don‘t open a banking app or compare mortgage rates. Instead, over coffee, you say: “Find me the best mortgage for a $650,000 home. Fixed for 10 years. Flexibility matters more than the lowest payment.”

Within seconds, an AI agent compares lenders, checks affordability, reviews fees, and recommends three banks. Those banks speak not to you, but to your agent.

This may sound futuristic, but a decade ago, asking AI for financial advice instead of searching Google seemed equally improbable. The interface is changing again, including who banks communicate with and how decisions are made.

The strategic question is no longer whether AI will transform banking. It‘s: What happens when banks compete not only for customers, but for the agents representing them?

When customer experience meets agent experience

Banking has reinvented itself with every new customer interface—from branches and call centers to online and mobile banking. Now another interface is emerging: not another screen, but another decision-maker.

Banks have spent decades refining the customer experience (CX). As AI agents increasingly act on customers’ behalf, they may need to focus just as intently on agent experience (AX).

These agents won’t be influenced by an award-winning app. Instead, they’ll compare, calculate, and negotiate based on whether product information is structured, APIs are reliable, pricing is transparent, and lending criteria can be interpreted by software.

This makes APIs the new front door. A bank’s next “customer” may never see its interface; instead, an AI agent might assess its offering in milliseconds, reject its API, and move on to a competitor. The API becomes the storefront, the product catalog becomes the sales pitch, and data quality becomes the bank’s reputation.

As one banking executive observed, “We’ve spent years polishing the front door while nobody looked at the loading dock.” In an agent-driven market, APIs may become the loading dock—the route through which financial products are discovered, evaluated, and accessed. API quality is therefore no longer simply an IT metric. It’s a business capability and a source of competitive advantage.

In this sense, AI agents are the DeLorean of banking—not because they transport us into the future, but because they allow us to examine today’s business model through tomorrow’s lens.

The customer journey is shrinking

Banks have optimized every stage of the customer journey, from awareness and comparison to approval and onboarding. AI agents can compress much of that journey into seconds. The journey becomes an evaluation, and the evaluation becomes a recommendation. Competition moves from winning attention to earning algorithmic preference.

A European mortgage lender recently asked us, “How do we make our mortgage journey more digital?” The deeper issue was whether future customers would complete that journey themselves—or delegate it to an AI agent.

Together, we reframed the discussion around information architecture, APIs, and product transparency. What began as a UX discussion became a strategic conversation about the bank’s future distribution model.

A new kind of trust

Banking has always been built on trust. As customers increasingly use AI to support financial decisions, banks may need to earn the trust not only of customers, but also of the systems advising them.

That trust will come from transparent products, consistent decisions, reliable data, secure interactions, and information that intelligent systems can readily understand.

From AI inside the bank to AI beyond it

CGI’s Andy Schmidt recently argued that banking has moved beyond AI experimentation. The challenge is no longer proving what AI can do through isolated pilots—it’s redesigning the business around AI. (The science fair is over: Building what’s next in banking | CGI.com).

Most banks ask, “How can AI improve our operations?” A more strategic question is, “How will AI change who interacts with our bank?” Increasingly, the first interaction may come from software acting for a customer.

AI creates opportunities to rethink how banks serve customers, make decisions, and deliver value across an increasingly intelligent ecosystem.

Six questions worth asking today

Whether this future arrives in 3 years or 10 is almost beside the point. Leadership teams should already be asking:

• Are our products machine-readable?
• Can AI accurately understand and compare our offerings?
• Are our APIs designed for automated interactions?
• Is our pricing transparent enough for algorithmic decision-making?
• Can external AI systems interact with us securely?
• If an AI agent had to recommend one bank tomorrow, why would it choose ours?

These aren‘t simply technology questions. They‘re fundamental business strategy questions.

CGI’s latest Voice of Our Clients research highlights the opportunity and the work ahead. While 75% of banks are exploring agentic AI, 39% remain in the proof-of-concept phase. At the same time, 72% say responsible AI and digital innovation are accelerating digitization.

The next challenge is scaling AI beyond the enterprise and preparing for customers who rely on agents to evaluate products and make decisions for them.

Preparing for the next interface

Every major banking interface has seemed obvious after it arrived: online, mobile, and open banking. AI agents may become the next interface—not replacing people or advisors, but increasingly acting on customers’ behalf to discover, evaluate, and select products.

The most important question may therefore no longer be, “How should our bank use AI?” It may be, “How ready is our bank for customers who increasingly rely on AI?”

There is no established playbook, which is precisely why the conversation matters. Over the last five decades, CGI has helped banks navigate profound change by identifying where innovation creates lasting value—from modernizing core platforms to reimagining digital customer experiences.

Today, that means preparing for customers whose financial decisions are increasingly supported—or delegated—to AI. It requires anticipating changes in customer behavior, distribution models, and market expectations before they become competitive reality.

If this blog leaves you with more questions than answers, that may be where the conversation should begin. I welcome the opportunity to discuss what this future could mean for your organization and how to prepare.