What Does the AI Future Really Look Like for Banking?
HOST (Brett King):
We’ve seen AI moving from theory to real-world deployment faster than anyone imagined. At The Futurists X Summit, you heard from leaders across industries. What stood out to you about how AI is changing banking and society at large?
GUEST:
One of the biggest themes was acceleration. Every sector, from finance to energy to healthcare, is moving faster than our governance structures. Banks are traditionally cautious, but AI has forced the industry to rethink speed and experimentation. The challenge isn’t just adopting technology; it’s reengineering the culture to operate in an adaptive, learning-driven way.
HOST:
That tension, between innovation and governance, is something we’re all feeling. How do banks navigate the regulatory gray zones of AI?
GUEST:
It’s about collaboration and transparency. Regulators and innovators must co-create frameworks that keep pace with emerging tech. We heard that repeatedly at the summit: AI’s future isn’t just about smarter machines, but smarter institutions.
How Can Banks Balance Automation with Humanity?
HOST:
We talk a lot about “human-centered design” in fintech. At the summit, it seemed that the theme came up again and again in the context of AI.
GUEST:
Exactly. The next decade won’t just be about what AI can do, it’ll be about what humans should do. There’s this renewed focus on empathy, ethics, and creativity. AI should empower better human decisions, not replace them. The most successful banks will be the ones that automate the repetitive but amplify the relational.
- Human-centered design remains key to trust.
- Automation must complement, not replace, judgment.
- Data transparency is now part of customer experience.
QUOTE:
“AI is not here to erase the human element, it’s here to make it matter more.”
What Are the Key Shifts Financial Leaders Need to Prepare For?
HOST:
From the panels and workshops you attended, what were the biggest shifts executives should be preparing for right now?
GUEST:
Three things stood out:
- Cognitive infrastructure: Banks are building systems that think contextually, not just computationally.
- Augmented intelligence: Decision-making will be increasingly co-piloted by AI assistants and predictive analytics.
- Ethical resilience: Building a governance model that can flex and adapt as algorithms evolve is becoming a competitive advantage.
HOST:
That last point, ethical resilience, is powerful. Many organizations underestimate how much brand trust will hinge on responsible AI.
GUEST:
Absolutely. The summit conversations made it clear: ethical AI is strategic AI. Without transparency and accountability, innovation can’t scale sustainably.
How Will AI Redefine Work and Creativity?
HOST:
Let’s talk about the future of work. A lot of people worry that AI will replace jobs, while others say it’ll create entirely new ones. What’s your take?
GUEST:
It’s both, and that’s what makes this moment so complex. Routine tasks will be automated, yes, but the creative layer, the part that requires intuition, vision, and empathy, is going to explode. Financial professionals who can interpret data and translate it into meaning will be in higher demand than ever.
HOST:
So it’s less about fighting automation and more about evolving with it?
GUEST:
Exactly. At The Futurists X Summit, one speaker put it perfectly: “The future belongs to the augmented human.” That mindset shift, from competition with machines to collaboration with them, is where progress will come from.
What Role Does Collaboration Play in Shaping an AI Future?
HOST:
The summit emphasized multi-sector collaboration, startups, regulators, and financial incumbents working together. How realistic is that?
GUEST:
It’s essential. AI’s power comes from its network effects. No single institution can manage its risks or seize its opportunities in isolation. The event showed a new model of innovation emerging, one that’s open, cooperative, and globally connected.
- Fintechs bring agility.
- Banks bring scale.
- Policymakers bring legitimacy.
Bridging those worlds is the new competitive edge.
QUOTE:
“AI’s next frontier isn’t technological, it’s collaborative.”
Key Takeaways from The Futurists X Summit
- AI is accelerating faster than regulation can adapt.
- Ethical design and governance will define trust in digital banking.
- Collaboration between finance, tech, and policy is now non-negotiable.
- The future of fintech depends on human-centered innovation.
- Leadership in the AI era means embracing both empathy and experimentation.
Final Thoughts
HOST:
If there’s one message you’d leave leaders with as they prepare for this AI-driven future, what would it be?
GUEST:
Stay curious, stay collaborative, and stay human. Technology will always change faster than we expect, but what endures is the purpose behind it. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that use AI to create clarity, not complexity.
QUOTE:
“In an age of intelligent machines, wisdom becomes the true currency.”
Raw Transcript:
615 Inside The Futurists X Summit Preparing For An AI Powered Future
Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.
Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.
Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I’m your host, Brett King. This week, we return to the United Arab Emirates, to Dubai, where we hosted the Futurist X Summit on September 22nd and 23rd.
We had over 1,000 people in attendance over the two days, and for the event, we were able to bring around 35 of the world’s top-ranked futurists globally to Dubai to attend this event and participate in discussions around future readiness, government policy setting, how to future-proof your organization, and looking at the future of economics, geopolitics, and of course, technologies like artificial intelligence, medical advances in longevity, and so forth. As part of this event, we had the kind support of MasterCard, and this week, we wanted to highlight a couple of those interviews. Welcome to the Futurist X Summit.
We’re here in Dubai for the world’s largest gathering of top-ranked futurists on the planet, and I’m here with J.K. Khalil from MasterCard. J.K. Exciting to be here. Thank you for having me, Brett.
So, look, I have to start by saying that actually the name, the Futurist X Summit, you’re actually responsible for that. At least half of it. Yeah, because, okay, I’m the futurist.
I wanted to be the X. You wanted to be the X, and so we came up with the Futurist X Summit. So, we hung out together at the Grand Prix last year in Abu Dhabi and got to know each other a bit, started discussing this, because I’ve been trying to put this together for a couple of years now. We actually had something planned before the pandemic and had to sort of rethink it, but here we are today.
We’ve had over 800 people registered for the event. We had a full room this morning, some phenomenal speakers, Brian Cox in the morning. What do you think we were trying to achieve with this, and has it met the framework of what we talked about? Yeah, so a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I said to the team, look, we just launched this AI Center of Excellence in the UAE in partnership with the Ministry of AI.
How can you really bring it to life so people understand that AI is just not a buzzword? It’s not a two-letter buzzword. It’s something more. Something is really happening, and we need to take kind of full awareness of it as a community, and we want people to really understand the bigger picture.
We at Mastercard are always talking to our customers about the fast and accelerating pace of change and how it is impacting their lives, livelihoods of their consumers, their technologies, their infrastructure, their legacy, sometimes their vision, like how they’re being disrupted, especially when you talk about banks, right? You talk about bank disruptions. You talk about peak branches, and these are great, but I think it’s almost, to me, it feels like we’re stuck on a treadmill, and we’re breathing super fast, super loud. Okay, things are changing.
Things are changing, but nobody’s taking a step back and saying, but what is the big picture? Why is this all changing? And so I think that’s what we wanted to do, if I remember, because you and I, I remember we spent the whole evening not talking about the conference at all. We spent the evening talking about possible futures, and what could happen, and what about this, and what if we start a civilization from there, and I remember going back and forth along the historical timeline with you for like three hours. My wife had to come clean us up from the place, right? So I think what you and I realized is that there is not enough talk about the big picture, and I think that’s a bit sad because people are just going in every direction, and there’s a lot of buzz and people running around sometimes, and we wanted to give that frame, which I think this morning with Brian’s tee off, and the way he just teed us off was amazing, because he gave us the biggest possible picture.
There’s nothing bigger than the cosmos, right? And people, I was like looking around me, people going like, what, we’re talking cosmology right now? And then he brought it back down to what it means to have access to something like quantum computing. I think that full circle, I don’t, I’ve never seen anyone do it, and he’s done it so elegantly. He’s just such a phenomenal communicator.
So shout out to Brian Cox. So simple. What makes you optimistic about the future, and where do you think we should go from here? Look, I’m optimistic, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
I see things a little bit differently than most people, to be honest, and this is a very personal answer, not a MasterCard answer, and I’ll give you both. The reason I see things with a bit more balance is because I look at everything as a bit of yin and yang. I don’t see good without bad.
As a conscious species, we are just a play, right? We are just emerging from something much, much bigger. It’s very Shakespearean. Very Shakespearean, but if you think about it, we are an occurrence, we are an emerging feature of this planet, of this galaxy, and so long as there’s people like us thinking about the safeguarding of this species, of this planet, doing good, that force keeps me optimistic, because I know there’s a lot of bad actors out there, and at MasterCard, that’s all we worry about, bad actors, how to protect.
I mean, you heard Johan Gerber earlier saying that we’ve invested close to $11 or $12 billion of that three years alone just to protect from bad actors, because it’s like any time a new technology comes around, there’s people trying to take advantage of it. Granted, that is the very nature of, I guess, our human experience, but what keeps me excited is focusing on the good stuff, focusing on the people trying to do the right things, focusing on people trying to help improve the quality of this human experience altogether. That is what I’m focused on, and I think platforms like these give me the hope that when I see the kind of turnout that we had, remember we were talking two weeks ago, we’re like 3, 400, and suddenly like 800 plus, but this is the hope that people are interested in a better future.
Well, we couldn’t have done it without you, and we couldn’t have done it without MasterCard. We couldn’t have done it without you. No, I guess so.
So it’s a perfect partnership. Yeah, absolutely, and I really appreciate your support of the event, and we’ve had a great time, and I look forward to being on stage with you tomorrow. Same.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brad.
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That’s fin.ai slash breaking banks. We’ve been here in Dubai to launch the Futurist Summit with your kind support and the support of MasterCard. But, you know, we tried to collect together some of the world’s foremost Futurists in respect to… It was a formidable lineup.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I was going to ask you. What did you think of the talent here? What stands out? I am actually very pleasantly surprised how you pulled off such a fantastic lineup of speakers.
World-class, very well-renowned, have a lot of gravitas and stature in their respective fields. I thought it was fantastic. You know, I mean, you have presided over some pretty amazing experiences around the world with your priceless campaign.
And one of the things that the potential of this world that we’re talking about today is as AI improves our quality of life and people are working less and living longer, you know, longevity has been a very key thing. What does the world look like when we can have more time to experience the world? You know, you’ve really built MasterCard’s brand on that, the experiential side. See, what happens is if you look at life in a, not a philosophical way, but in a real practical way, people have to do certain things to be able to earn.
And that money is what probably they will use to live the life that they would want. So today, if you look at the entire space, on an average, people work five days, at least a week, and they get two days to enjoy. But if you look at the corporations, particularly, or even in areas where people have to put in manual labor, they’re working seven days a week, six days a week.
So the work component is much higher in life than enjoying life. And that’s absolutely true. And there has been a movement, particularly in Europe, to say, maybe should the balance be a little altered to have four-day working weeks so people can have three-day weekends and so on, which I think is a very good thought in the right direction of where the future should be going.
But that suddenly becomes possible with AI. Now, with AI, a lot of dreadful, dredgery kind of tasks and chores can be delegated to the machine to do it, whether it is through automation on one hand, and AI, which actually enables automation, plus also it has got a lot more empowerment that it brings to you as an individual to let go of those things. So your time gets freed up so much more to do other things.
This is at a very one level. And that time, then what do you do with it? Either you keep doomscrolling nonstop and become like a zombie, or you start involving in passions and pursue your passions. We at MasterCard are focused on those passions.
What are you truly passionate about? And how can we enable you to realize your passion? How can we help you get experiences that are unbelievable and elevates your passion and involvement and passion to a different level altogether? So I’ll just give you one tangible example. So if you are a fan of, say, Formula One, yeah, you watch on the TV, you watch on stuff and on the net or F1 channel or whatever. But what we are trying to do through our sponsorship is curate experiences that are once-in-a-lifetime that you can either enjoy because you have been selected for those experiences or you can vicariously enjoy when you see other people just like you had an opportunity to get into behind the scenes and look into the car and be a part of the briefing that happens, the team briefing, or see the pit stop at close quarters, or even be a part of the crew on an experimental basis.
So we are planning so many things out there, it takes it to a different level. But then there is other big elephant in the room that we cannot ignore, which is if AI is coming so much prevalent and you delegate a lot of things to AI and automation, corporations require lesser number of people to do those jobs, which means employment is going to be a problem. People are going to lose their jobs, or if they are not having a job, they’ll struggle to find those jobs.
Now imagine you are a copywriter in your 50s in an ad agency. Now, Claude, for example, does such fantastic copywriting, and there are tools like Writer or Jasper, which are fantastic at creating, and they’re as good as what a terrific copywriter does. Now, therefore, I have seen examples in some agencies where they had before 12 copywriters in that area.
Now there are only two. Now, if you’re one of those… Are we both out of a job as authors then? Come again? Are we both out of a job as authors? Because we’ve both written books. Correct.
But I have seen also people who have written books using AI, which are like, you feel like throwing up, because there is no soul. It just is gathering of information and data points and then regurgitating in a senseless fashion. So I’m not concerned.
Writing is not all about as an author. You have written far, far, far many books. Mine is only a record of one, but hopefully that one book will become multiple books in the future.
But the point is… How many translations? 14 translations I have. That’s impressive, brother. Yeah, that I don’t really feel light about.
I really feel good about it. So 14 languages it has been and it’s being used in 300 universities around the world. Now, will AI come and do write a book with as much of substance, as much of examples, as much of thing? I would like to believe no.
And I tend to believe right now, no, because I’ve seen any number of AI written books. That’s a nice statement. Yeah.
Five years down the line, well, maybe I’ll pursue a different career at that stage. I guess I’ll just writing books, maybe I’ll give speeches or whatever else it is. But you’re one of the world’s preeminent marketers, right? And you’ve written a book, Quantum Marketing, which really gets down to this very highly personalized, we used to call it world of one or marketing of one, segment of one.
Segment of one, exactly. But we’re now looking at this AI ability to superpower personalization and targeting and so forth. And we know how already how good AI can be at psychological manipulation in those messages.
So are we going to be completely powerless to make our own decisions in the future? Will these really sophisticated, highly personalized marketing campaigns? I think on the one hand, it is not like we’ll be made helpless and the machine will lead our lives. That’s not how it’s going to be, right? The machines will be subservient to you. They take the drudgery out of your daily work or your daily routine.
And they enable, they enrich you. Like a sword, you can kill with it or you can do something good and defend. In the same way, AI can be used for good or bad.
There’ll be bad actors that’ll be very smart. They’ll try to have deep fakes and do all kinds of havoc. And I was actually reading an article recently, just two, three days back, which talked about spamming as a service provided by an AI startup.
Now that’s crazy, but yeah, that kind of, those kinds of things will be there. But the way I see it is a little different in terms of future. So today, for example, I want to travel to, I’ll give you a real example, right? I was wanting to buy one item for my home.
I went to Perplexity, their Comet browser. I don’t get paid to talk about any of these brands, by the way. This is not an endorsement in any way.
It is just a capability I was very impressed by. So I actually asked for it to do search. I gave exactly the parameters that I wanted.
I had to look for the best deal and find the best discount codes, check that the discount codes actually work. Because many times when I hunt for discount codes, only to go to be told invalid discount code, which is frustrating. And after some time you give up and then buy it for whatever rate.
Now this is persistent and it came up with the best discount and actually went and bought that item. It saved me so much of agony. It’s unbelievable.
Suddenly you find empowered, right? Now I know I’m getting a great deal thanks to this one. So everyone has an elite personal shopper at their disposal. At their disposal.
And they are absolutely experts and they have your best interest, not somebody else’s best interest. And they don’t have to pay individually for that shopper either. So it’s a big win.
Likewise, I have seen in terms of, you know, I, one of the interesting sessions that you had was on biohacking out here. So I’m into biohacking as well in a very rudimentary way. And even with that, I was doing research using AI tools and asked for it to give me, you know, I fed all my medical reports and everything.
I said, tell me what is happening with me. Okay. What are the things which are good? What are the things I need to improve upon? And to improve upon what do I need to do? What supplements will agree with me? Here are my genetic testing results, everything.
Honestly, it gave me better input to me than my doctor did. And with my doctor, I had to be conscious of his time here. No, I just keep asking question after question.
It patiently answers me. And if I’m not satisfied, I ask for clarification. It gives me, and eventually it gave me the plan, which I tell you is superb.
Honestly, if, you know, if I have a family member in five years, go to a doctor and I find out that that doctor didn’t have AI, I’ll tell them, you need to go to the doctor with AI because it’s going to be that clear, you know, and the same is true of legal advice and so forth. Just to finish up a couple of things. First of all, you had a session with Ross Dawson on stage today, which thank you very much for participating.
But when you talked about marketing to agentic AI, so what’s that about? So in this example, I gave you, I delegated my decision to an agent to search for me, do all the research, recommend to me the final solution. Going forward, I can even delegate that part of the decisioning as well. So autonomously, the agent can go and buy what it believes is best for me based on my history, as well as my specs that I give it.
So like the inline miles and rewards and things that we use to motivate people to buy stuff today may not work in that sense because your agent… May or may not. It doesn’t get disintermediated in that way. But the point is, today as a marketer, if I am marketing to Raja, and if Raja has already delegated it to the machine, what’s the point of talking to Raja? Because the inertia of resetting your preferences on the agentic AI are going to be fairly intense.
And people find, you know, it’s just laziness. It’s just the habit that once you have said something, you don’t want to go and redo the whole thing. So you just let the agent keep taking the decisions.
So my approach as a marketer has to be totally different, number one. Number two, you can appeal to Raja, the consumer, appealing to his emotions and his feelings and insecurities, aspirations, status needing, needing status, or status, you know. As well as hierarchies.
Exactly. All the stuff is there. But an agent is brutal.
It is cold logic. And based on my specs, it says that all that is fluff. Don’t get taken away by that, taken in by this marketing spiel.
All you need to do is to see what criteria match your requirements. I’ll go and buy that. So there is a lot of cold logic that will come in, in the purchase decisions, which puts marketing on its head, on the one hand.
Second, from a marketer’s perspective now, if I have to do that marketing of one, the segment of one, in a hyper-personalized, hyper-targeted kind of a fashion, it is not possible thanks to AI and the speed with which the calculations are done by and the models actually crunch data, plus the availability of 5G and soon to be 6G, what will happen is I can do real-time adaptations of my marketing campaigns by the second. Humanly impossible to do. So what do I do? I create a marketing agent.
That marketing agent will then understand what I am giving it as a spec to it, goes after the people who I define as a core audience, understand their behavior, crunch data, and say this is the offer that has to go to this customer, this is the kind of communication it has to go to that customer’s agent. So what happens now is the marketer has delegated the decisioning and execution to the agent, and the consumer has delegated their decisioning and execution to the agent. So now it’s the agent talking to the agent, the robot talking to the robot, literally.
It’s going to be a totally different game. How are you preparing your team for this transition? Firstly, it all begins with awareness. And we have completed our training program to almost 60-65% of my entire team on what exactly is agentic, to see the demos of agentic.
How do you become discoverable as a brand in the world of AI and LLM-based search as opposed to the traditional search on Google? So SEO is practically going to disappear. They’re saying next year itself, SEO will come down from 100 to 75. My guess is it’ll go even steeper than that, the growth rate of what I’m seeing on the LLM side.
So we are educating them. I have a professor from one of the universities, and he is a luminary in the world of these advanced technologies, including AI. He takes a monthly lesson from all my team members.
So we have hands-on experiences, we have lots of pilots that we have commissioned, and we share the results of those pilots with our entire team across the company so that you don’t have to redo the same experiment to come up the curve. You are seeing one of your colleagues is doing this, you are doing something else, somebody else is doing something else. You bring those learnings to the table and then start actually executing in real time.
So we probably, I would say, are one of the companies which has deployed AI in marketing, probably, I would say, in the top one percentile, maybe. So discretionary spending by 2027-2028 has already shifted to agentic AI. Is that realistic timeframe? I would say agentic AI is going to be here sooner than we anticipate.
I think 2027-2028 is, I think, very realistic, very realistic. I think it’ll be even sooner. All right.
Well, I only believe this one thing. One of the reasons we’ve done this event, and we’re so appreciative of Mastercard’s support, but one of the reasons we got this group of futurists together was to have an optimistic view. How do we get to the future in a less chaotic way? And how do we use this intelligence to plan and transition in a normal manner? But what makes you optimistic about the future? See, as a marketer, for me, there are two things which give me the reasons for optimism.
Number one, when there is a world where technology is so developed, everyone has access to the technology. The accessibility of technology becomes very pervasive. And now I’m a marketer, I want to give a brief to the chat GPT.
It spews out excellent output, whether it is strategy or whether it is even creatives. Now you are another company and there are hundreds of thousands of companies. Each one is giving briefs to their respective chat GPTs.
The outcomes will all now look identical or almost identical. So you are now going to have a sea of sameness. Hmm.
Now, if you’re a good marketer and that’s where people come in picture, they lead and differentiate by being more creative, by being unorthodox, by being innovation, innovative, and marketing is the function which delivers exactly these. So this is going to be the golden age for marketing to help companies win the battle in a sea of sameness in the marketplace. So I’m very optimistic about it.
Number one. Number two, I always used to daydream saying, oh, I wish I could do this. Wish I could do that in the world of marketing.
Today, you can dream of any damn thing and you’re able to actually execute it. Infinite possibilities. Infinite possibilities and almost in real time, which is amazing.
And so it’s also not just AI or agentic, it’s a confluence of various technologies coming together. Like I see augmented reality coming up very quickly in the near future. We have got cryptos after the winter and our cryptos have come back, which has got profound implications for marketing.
Blockchains and the provenance, because there are so many knockoffs. Provenance, it’s really a phenomenal thing that will happen. Transformation.
Exactly. All these things are suddenly sort of materializing. This is something which is going to be so empowering marketers that you can really give the true value, serve the consumers with your heart and still make lots of money for your company.
So I think this is the best combination of everything that there is to be. So I feel terrific about it. Interesting marketing lens on the future.
Raja, thank you for attending The Futurist. Thank you very much. Thank you for MasterCard’s incredible support.
We couldn’t have done it without you. And we did bring together, I think, a phenomenal group of people and it’s been a priceless experience. I think that’s a beautiful summarization.
Having witnessed it firsthand, what you have pulled together, since I think we spoke about something like this a few months back at one of the conferences, and you have made it a reality now and are so super impressed with the quality. So hearty congratulations to you and thank you for your partnership. Really appreciate it.
Thank you. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by a U.S.-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham.
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