Banks turning to AI to gain productivity

Written by Kelly Sanchez on May 13, 2026

Miami-Dade banks are turning to artificial intelligence as a tool for productivity gains, experts say.

Financial institutions are using AI in areas like automated trading, credit decisions and customer service. The American Bankers Association’s website states that “there is a complex web of applicable laws, regulations and supervisory guidance that is relevant to AI usage,” the “most important” being “model risk management expectations issued by the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

While these guidelines technically apply to models rather than AI specifically, the agencies’ Supervisory Guidance on Model Risk Management says that “[w]hile outside the scope of this guidance, more qualitative approaches used by banking organizations – i.e., those not defined as models according to this guidance – should also be subject to a rigorous control process.”

Adrian Rodriguez, the executive vice president and interim chief operating officer of Amerant Bank, said banks in this market are implementing AI use in “repetitive tasks” to boost productivity.

“So typically in our market, the banks are leveraging AI, mostly with productivity in repetitive tasks,” he said. “So we’re seeing it a lot in operations, in fraud to detect anomalies and suspicious transactions more easily. We’re also seeing it in some customer-facing processes, such as chatbots, but primarily AI right now is being viewed as a productivity tool to support the operations of banks.”

“So large institutions are reporting meaningful reductions in processing time and costs,” Mr. Rodriguez continued. “It allows employees to focus on higher-value, advisory and judgment-based work.

“But right now,” he continued,” AI is still very new, at least the newer technologies of AI; AI, in some capacity, has been around for many years, but what we’re seeing right now is more of a shift towards semi-autonomous work. Agentic AI is the term known in the industry, even though banks have some limitations due to regulatory oversight with the use and deployment of such technology. So some of the larger banks, because they’re deploying it and developing it at scale, are seeing meaningful gains right now. The smaller community and regional banks – they have to be more strategic and intentional about what initiatives they focus on with AI.”

Intercredit Bank CEO Francesc Noguera, who will assume the same title as the bank transitions to a digital banking model under its brand Pibank, also explained that his bank is looking for productivity gains with AI use. However, it’s not interacting directly with customers.

“We have started in our case on the credit side because credit has become a very important driver in our growth, and we saw that AI agents work very well to support the underwriting part of the credit analysis,” Mr. Noguera said. “We are doing that already, and also we are using AI in other parts of the bank, but always behind the scenes so far. That means no AI interaction with customers.”