What is Agentic AI and Can It Be Used In Finance?

What can LLMs actually do for us?

Agentic AI: What is it and can we use it in Finance & Investing?

If you’ve been paying attention to the AI frontier lately, all the buzz has been on “Agentic AI”.  How a new generation of AI Agents will change industries from hospitality and leisure to medicine and life sciences.  Can Agentic AI live up to the hype? More importantly, can it live up to the hype and have an impact on traditional and staid industries like Finance?

LLM/AI Chatbot Overview

To understand Agentic AI, you first need to understand the difference between Agentic AI and LLMs, better known as AI chatbots.  AI chatbots use natural language processing to answer questions and queries from users.  In essence, they’ve ‘studied’ vast tracts of the internet and deliver answers that they’ve been trained to have a high probability of being correct.  This has led to a revolution of proliferating chatbots and uses from writing college essays to helping plan vacations.  All great developments (but don’t use it to cheat, kids!).

Overall, this has been an incredible technological development.  However, as LLMs have proliferated, their limitations have also become abundantly clear.  LLM training is done with a vast but largely static dataset.  Yet, the vast majority of human experience is undocumented, uncommented upon, and unspoken of.  Society progresses in dynamic ways and LLMs are in a never-ending cycle of catch up. 

Relatedly, in professional environments where we’d like to deploy AI, problems are often complex, multi-step, and dynamic.  Solving real-world problems in a reliable fashion requires dynamic intelligence.  Or in other words, AI tools that understand intentions and are plugged into the real-world domains they specialize in.  This is where Agentic AI as a dynamic tool shines, versus LLMs which we view as largely trained on static datasets.

Agentic AI

Agentic AI doesn’t solely rely on natural language processing.  Rather than just responding to queries by regurgitating the internet (which as we know, sometimes it’s garbage in, garbage out), Agentic AI relies on intelligent reasoning of analytical models, third-party data, and applications to independently solve multi-step problems, develop strategies, and execute specific tasks. 

How exactly is this different and does Agentic AI still use LLMs? 

Well, LLMs are still highly useful, in that Agentic AI can use them to help understand user queries and orchestrate independent functions and analysis.  In fact, the front end of an Agentic AI solution might still look like a chatbot.  Under the hood, however, there are major differences. Once tasks or directions are understood, Agentic AI digests data from a myriad of sources (not just textual data), analyzes the information with internal or external models and applications, and responds with reliable, deterministic results and actions.

So, What are the Applications?

Part of the wonder of LLMs are their simple chat design and quick, confident responses to ‘asks’.  Part of the difficulty in using them in professional settings (like investing!) is that they are supremely confident while at times being supremely incorrect.  Agentic AI changes this paradigm.  Imagine a world where clinical trials can be designed, analyzed, and reported on with a single software system.  Or the automation of administrative tasks in healthcare settings, where every detail matters.  Or booking a full travel itinerary, with the click of a button, and no worrying about whether that tour is really happening or that restaurant is still open. AI Agents are reliable, and precise by design. Something LLMs are unlikely to ever achieve, no matter their compute power.

Agentic AI in Finance & Investing

In regulated industries such as finance, where there are fiduciary responsibilities, Agentic AI creates a reliable, precise, and transparent solution for professionals and their clients alike.  While we can automate away administrative tasks, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Reliable financial planning, trustworthy conversations, portfolio management, and day-trading can all be done by Agentic AI.  Wealth Managers and Financial Advisors can spend more time building relationships and acquiring clients, but Agentic AI can handle much of the rest.  Here at Qaimera Technologies, we plan on changing the industry with it.

We’re not the only ones.  Agentic AI is set to change our future. Let’s all get aboard for the ride.