If you strip away the hype, the most meaningful AI stories in financial services are human ones: advisors who finally get back to advising, claims handlers who spend less time chasing documents, and contact-center agents who feel more capable on tough calls. In a year when employee engagement slipped to a decade low in the U.S. and declined globally, leaders need solutions that actually make work better—not just cheaper.
Why the employee experience (EX) is a growth lever
There’s a well-documented link between better EX and better customer outcomes. Gallup’s analyses show that engagement correlates with higher performance; conversely, low engagement is estimated to cost the global economy $8.9 trillion—about 9% of global GDP. In 2024, global engagement fell from 23% to 21%, underscoring the urgency to remove friction from daily work.
Banking and insurance add a unique twist: compliance and documentation are heavier than in most sectors, and they siphon time away from high-value client moments. U.S. banks report that executive and board time devoted to regulatory matters has grown sharply—up to 42–43%—crowding out strategy. Meanwhile, financial advisors report that a sizable share of their week still goes to admin and compliance rather than client conversations.
AI’s real EX impact: specific, human-centered use cases
1) AI assistants for frontline teams.
When agents get an AI-powered support tool that surfaces next best actions, drafts summaries, and retrieves knowledge in real time, productivity rises—especially for newer colleagues. In a large-scale study of 5,179 support agents, access to a generative AI assistant increased issues resolved per hour by 14% on average and by 34% for novice workers. That’s an EX story: people feel more capable, learn faster, and handle complexity with less stress.
2) Giving advisors their time back.
Advisors want to spend more time with clients, but admin and compliance pile-ups persist. J.D. Power has flagged “time-starved” advisors, and other surveys confirm advisors still split meaningful time across paperwork, reporting, and updates that technology could streamline. AI that automates prep, note-taking, suitability checks, and post-meeting follow-ups returns hours to relationship work.
The human payoff matters: nearly eight in ten bank employees say their job satisfaction would rise if they could streamline non-customer-facing tasks—precisely the kind of work AI can chip away at.
3) Claims and underwriting, refocused on empathy.
For insurers, generative AI can reduce loss-adjusting expense 20–25% by automating repetitive steps (document prep, first-notice communications, evidence gathering), letting handlers focus on tricky causality, empathy, and exception resolution. Real-world deployments are accelerating: Suncorp uses AI and aerial imagery to speed natural-disaster assessment—shrinking the time to decisions in moments when customers are most vulnerable.
4) Faster onboarding and upskilling amid talent shifts.
Wealth management faces a looming advisor retirement wave—McKinsey estimates ~110,000 U.S. advisors (38% of today’s total) will retire within a decade. AI knowledge assistants that answer “how we do it here,” summarize policies, and simulate client scenarios can compress ramp times and reduce the cognitive load on mentors.
5) Safer, simpler compliance workflows.
Generative AI won’t replace human judgment in risk, but it can assemble evidence packs, draft narratives tied to policy, and highlight anomalies across content stores—reducing swivel-chair effort while preserving audit trails. Organizations that modernize end-to-end processes with AI are already seeing outsized performance gains: companies with AI-led processes report ~2.4x productivity versus peers.
Adoption is real—but design choices matter
AI use is no longer fringe: by mid-2024, 65% of organizations reported regularly using generative AI—nearly double the prior year. In insurance specifically, 76% of carriers say they’ve implemented genAI in one or more functions. The lesson: technology is ready; employee trust, change management, and governance will decide who turns pilots into durable EX improvements.
To keep AI human-centered in FS:
- Make the assistant visible, not the model. Ship task-level AI helpers inside the tools people already use.
- Design for novices first. Evidence shows the biggest productivity lift accrues to less-tenured workers.
- Tie output to policy. Each suggestion should cite the policy, control, or clause it’s based on.
- Protect the employee day. Use AI to kill copy-paste and “where’s that file?” time, not to accelerate already-overloaded queues.
What to measure (beyond cost)
Leaders who anchor on EX as the north star track:
- Time returned to humans: minutes per claim, per case, or per meeting reclaimed.
- Experience indicators: advisor satisfaction and intent to stay, plus agent confidence scores post-call.
- Quality and fairness: error rates, reversal rates, and the share of AI outputs with linked evidence.
- Customer lift: when EX improves, handle times and first-contact resolution move with NPS/CSAT.
How OpenText can help—practical building blocks for human-centered AI
OpenText™ Aviator brings private, enterprise-grade AI to where work happens—your content, workflows, and customer journeys. Banks and insurers can use Aviator to power conversational search across policies, procedures, and case files; summarize long documents; and generate first drafts of communications, freeing staff to focus on judgment and care.
OpenText™ Core Content Management connects people, content, and processes—governing the information lifecycle and integrating with SAP, Microsoft 365, Salesforce. That means fewer hunts for “the latest version,” clearer context in Microsoft Teams, and auditable content for regulators.
OpenText™ Communications (Exstream) equips advisors and operations teams with a single platform to produce compliant, personalized omnichannel communications. For insurers using Guidewire, OpenText Communications has accelerators that streamline template management and document generation right inside your core system.
Why now: AI adoption is surging, but value comes when you uplift the day-to-day experience of advisors, adjusters, underwriters, and agents. OpenText’s approach—private, governed AI embedded in content and communications workflows—helps return time to humans, improve confidence, and make every interaction feel more personal, compliant, and calm.
To find out more about OpenText Financial Services products and solutions, please visit: https://www.opentext.com/solutions/industry/financial-services.
