Banks Move to Rein In AI Agent Costs as Token Spending Climbs, McKinsey Says

The finding cuts against the main case banks have made for agentic AI, which is that it will lower operating costs. Some lenders now give responsibility for AI spending to dedicated teams that they call "AI FinOps", Reuters reported, citing the review, and are concentrating agent deployments on the areas where they expect the strongest returns.

The first round of cost controls sent employee questions to different AI models depending on how complex they were. Vik Sohoni, a McKinsey senior partner and one of the report's authors, told Reuters that this approach stops working once AI agents are involved, because agents talk to one another and run up token usage quickly.

Banks are also changing how they justify the spending. Productivity savings remain the easier gain to measure, but lenders are increasingly looking to revenue growth driven by AI to support larger budgets, according to the Reuters account of the report.

The consultancy expects AI agents to reach wide use among customers within three years, compared with the five to 10 years it took the mobile internet to reach broad adoption. In a McKinsey survey of 46,000 retail banking customers worldwide, most of those who already use AI said they rely on it to compare services, find higher-yielding savings accounts and refinance or consolidate debt. Among AI users, 72% said they would let a banking agent carry out one financial task on their behalf, though they would cap autonomous approvals at $500.

That shift carries a risk for bank profits. Agents acting for customers could move money out of non-interest-bearing accounts into higher-yielding ones, eroding a cheap source of funding. The report says the effect has been limited so far because most banks do not allow outside AI agents to authorise transactions inside their systems.

The question for bank boards is whether those blocks hold as consumer agents spread. Reuters noted that Meta's Muse agent was downloaded 5 million times in the United States in its first 22 days.