From Co-Pilots to Agents: How Agentic AI Is Reshaping Regional Banking in 2026

The chatbot era is over. In this episode, Mike and Alex unpack the seismic shift from passive GenAI assistants to autonomous Agentic AI systems—and what it means for regional bank leaders navigating 2026.

Drawing from PiTech Solutions' latest research, they explore how multi-agent "squads" are transforming KYC and AML operations, delivering productivity gains that sound impossible until you understand the engineering behind them. But efficiency is only half the story.

The conversation turns to a more disruptive force: the "End of Inertia." As personal AI agents begin optimizing consumer finances autonomously—sweeping deposits, arbitraging rates, and executing micro-auctions in real time—the traditional banking model built on customer friction faces an existential challenge.

Mike and Alex also address the hard realities: legacy system constraints, the "Pilot Purgatory" trap, regulatory explainability requirements, and the emerging threat of adversarial AI deploying synthetic identities at scale.

For bank CIOs and COOs charting their technology roadmaps, this episode delivers a pragmatic framework—Crawl, Walk, Run—for deploying agentic capabilities without betting the institution on unproven systems.

Topics covered: Multi-agent systems, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) economy, Data Fabric architecture, decision chain logging for compliance, synthetic identity risk, and the evolving role of the human "AI Orchestrator."