The news: On its Q4 2025 earnings call, KeyBank CEO Christopher Gorman said AI has cut call center costs by 97%, with an AI-handled call costing about 35 cents versus $9 for a human agent. He added that the bank is investing heavily in technology and operations—$900 million in 2025—with a focus on customer-facing tools.

Trendspotting: Investments in and applications of technology and AI have been a major talking point for financial services executives recently:

• BNY’s Q4 2025 earnings call noted advances in AI adoption and referred back to its partnership with Google’s Gemini Enterprise for its in-house AI platform.
• Charles Schwab’s latest call highlighted how it’s incorporating AI into technology and customer service to improve representatives’ efficiency, with more applications planned.
• At its November investor day, Bank of America reported heavy AI use in its commercial banking platform, genAI market research tools, and applications in software development and fraud detection.
• Citi has mandated AI prompt training for most of its employees. As of last fall, employees have input more than 6.5 million prompts and reduced time spent on some tasks by orders of magnitude.
• JPMorgan has said that its $2 billion annual AI spend has generated comparable savings. Customer service representatives increasingly use AI to resolve customer problems, and over 40,000 of the bank’s engineers use AI coding assistants.

Implications for banks: US banks have quickly moved beyond AI experimentation. Forty-seven percent have already rolled out gen AI, per a 2025 EY-Parthenon survey—up from just 10% in 2023.

Internally facing use cases are increasingly common. That means banks can't hide behind the narrative that AI is new and untested—if they haven't already made significant deployments, they are behind.