Banks are taking AI into more parts of their operations, but their public disclosures offer little basis for deciding whether spending is generating financial returns.
Evident’s October 2026 index registered an increase in banks reporting financial benefits, from eight the prior year to 12 among the 50 institutions tracked. Evident recorded an effect on operational key performance indicators in 12% of tracked use cases, while concrete financial returns were disclosed for barely 1%.
On JPMorgan’s Oct. 13 earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said an estimate of about $700 million in annual AI expense was outdated. He said spending was spread across the bank and hard to isolate. “The benefits aren't observable in our current quarterly earnings,” Barnum said.
Banco Santander said Oct. 19 that serving a request in selected experiments cost about €0.03 with smaller, specialized models, compared with roughly €5 using large, general-purpose models. The bank said performance remained strong. In a separate customer-service experiment, costs fell by more than 50% as conversation quality improved. Santander described both results as experimental.
Agentic AI, which can carry out tasks in stages, made up nearly one-third of bank use cases Evident tracked in the first quarter of 2026, up from 15% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Bloomberg News reported that the computing demand of these workflows can be difficult to predict. The outlet also said banks’ technology budgets face competing demands from older-system upgrades and cybersecurity.
Bloomberg News reported that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) found some of its most powerful models, including Anthropic’s Opus, could cost C$3,000 per employee per month. The outlet said CIBC restricted access to a few hundred employees and capped testing of its CAI 2.0 workspace at 250 users, with monthly costs for that group ranging from C$4 to C$250. CIBC’s July announcement confirmed the pilot but did not disclose those costs or user limits.
S&P Global reported Oct. 20 that banks were expected to improve how they track and disclose AI gains. Analysts quoted by the outlet said those benefits can be hard to separate from broader transformation programs.
