Ronit Ghose, Industry Chair of the Future of Finance and AI Group at MFTA, joins Wall Street to MENA to break down agentic AI and what it actually means for banking in the Gulf.
Ghose explains the shift from generative AI (which shows you answers) to agentic AI (which acts on your behalf), using the analogy of booking a holiday versus having an assistant book it for you. He argues finance won’t go fully autonomous anytime soon. Regulators and internal compliance will keep humans in the loop, much like self-driving cars needed years of trials before hitting the road. Think assisted finance, not self-driving finance.
The conversation covers where banks in the region will feel the impact first: wealth management, client experience and the back-office workflows that currently employ large numbers of people. Ghose also points to three reasons the Gulf is positioned to lead on AI adoption: a young, digitally native population, tech-forward government leadership and heavy capital investment in AI infrastructure and data centers.
The episode closes on a risk that gets less attention than it should: herding. When AI models are trained in similar places, they can amplify the same biases across an entire market, creating bubbles faster than any individual investor could on their own.
Topics:
- What is agentic AI, and how is it different from generative AI
- Is autonomous AI safe for finance
- How close are we to AI managing our finances
- Where banks in the Gulf will feel the change first
- The Gulf’s three advantages in AI adoption
- The biggest risk: AI herding and bias amplification