From AI Assistance to Agentic Systems: Scaling Sovereign AI in Banking

AI is no longer defined by experimentation, it is defined by expectations. Customers expect intelligent guidance, employees expect real relief in their daily work, and regulators expect transparency, control, and accountability. In this joint keynote, Julia Koch (Finanz Informatik) and Markus Hacker (NVIDIA) share how AI transformation evolves when it’s built for everyday impact, sovereign operation, and agentic capabilities at scale. Building one of the largest AI implementations worldwide in the financial sector, Julia shares insights from the transition from AI assistants to agentic AI systems that proactively support complex processes across highly regulated, large-scale ecosystems. The session focuses on three decisive factors of effective AI transformation: • Use-case-driven value creation, ensuring AI delivers measurable benefits for customers and employees • agentic architectures, enabling AI systems to reason, orchestrate, and act within clearly defined boundaries • and sovereignty, providing full control over data, models, and infrastructure as a prerequisite for trust, compliance, and scalability. Attendees will gain insights into how Finanz Informatik builds and operates a fully sovereign and 100% on-prem AI platform for the Savings Banks Finance Group, scaling AI assistance and agentic capabilities across 341 institutions, 200,000 employees and 50 million customers. NVIDIA complements this perspective by showing how accelerated computing and modern AI architectures enable sovereign AI factories to run reliably, efficiently, and sustainably at enterprise scale. This session shows how AI becomes a growth engine when organizations move from pilots to platforms, from tools to systems, and from innovation promises to everyday impact.