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Sandra Solomon, Managing Executive for FSI and Retail, BCX

At BCX, AI is already moving from experimentation into real operational value across both financial services and retail. In financial services, the company is seeing strong relevance in fraud detection, risk support, customer service automation, credit decisioning and more contextual engagement. In retail, AI is helping improve demand forecasting, stock visibility, pricing optimisation and personalised customer experiences.

“Our clients are under pressure to serve diverse customer segments, manage cost, reduce fraud and deliver more seamless service across both physical and digital channels,” says BCX’s Sandra Solomon, Managing Executive for FSI and Retail. “In the short term, the focus is on governed, highvalue use cases with measurable outcomes. Medium-term, the opportunity is to embed AI more deeply into workflows, service models and decisioning so that it becomes part of the operating fabric.

“Agentic-AI takes organisations beyond content generation and simple automation into goal-oriented execution. In practical terms, that means systems that can interpret intent, draw from multiple data sources, trigger actions, escalate exceptions and support more autonomous decision flows. For example, in a financial services environment, this could mean an agent that not only flags a suspicious transaction, but initiates verification workflows, notifies the customer and triggers real-time internal controls.”

Relevance in both the FSI and retail sectors lies in handling customer queries more intelligently, supporting fraud investigation workflows, automating service fulfilment and helping business users access insight faster. Solomon says Agentic-AI moves beyond simple automation into more autonomous, goal-driven execution, however, the more capable these systems become, the more digital trust matters. “Trust means secure data use, accountability, explainability and confidence that AI is being applied responsibly and in line with business and regulatory expectations. Working across complex, high-volume environments, we see this most clearly in how clients balance real-time decisioning with regulatory accountability. The value is in what AI can do and how responsibly and transparently it is deployed.”

For enterprise clients, the shift from GenAI to Agentic-AI and digital trust is not a strategic change in direction, but the next stage of maturity. She says many enterprise clients started with GenAI around productivity, content generation and conversational interfaces. The next step is connecting AI more meaningfully to business processes, systems and decisions.

“Many organisations are balancing innovation with legacy estates, tighter budgets, rising cyber risk and growing regulatory scrutiny. Agentic-AI cannot sit on weak foundations. It requires trusted data, secure integration, clear governance, identity controls, auditability and defined points for human oversight. Without trust, agentic systems may create speed, but not confidence, which in regulated and customer-intensive sectors is not enough.

“Particularly in FSI and retail environments, where legacy systems, scale and regulatory pressure intersect, we are seeing Agentic-AI raising the bar on why foundations must be robust from the outset.”

Adaptability is now a leadership and operating requirement, says Solomon. “To thrive, organisations need adaptable, integrated, scalable and resilient technology foundations; adaptable operating models, where teams across data, security, customer experience and delivery are aligned; and adaptable leadership cultures that allow experimentation, but within clear guardrails. The organisations that are succeeding are those that can integrate change into already complex environments.

“Agentic-AI will also elevate cybersecurity by enabling more coordinated action, its greatest value coming in areas where speed, context and pattern recognition matter most. Agentic-AI can help detect unusual behaviour, prompt adaptive authentication and identify emerging risk patterns, increasingly important in an environment where fraud, phishing and identity-based attacks are rapidly evolving,” concludes Solomon.