How an Engineering Firm Looks to Accelerate Agentic Commerce

Sutherland Global Services Inc., a 40-year-old data-engineering company, has launched its FinAI Hub, an agentic AI platform aimed at banks and financial-service companies. The move comes as shopping and buying online increasingly becomes the province of bits of code unleashed by consumers and based on a form of artificial intelligence that lets users specify what products and what price range they are looking for.

Sutherland in its announcement early Friday maintains that while financial institutions are working to “accelerate AI adoption,” the trend has stalled, with “many initiatives confined to pilots.” By contrast, the Rochester, N.Y.-based engineering company, which focuses on AI and related technology, says its latest development is “geared for banks and programmed for retail banking, lending, and risk and compliance as well as payments and cards.”

“Financial institutions are under increasing pressure to drive growth, manage risk, and modernize operations simultaneously,” says Banwari Agarwal, chief executive at Sutherland for banking and financial services, in a statement. By contrast, he argues the FinAI Hub will allow “banks and financial services firms to move beyond isolated AI use cases and embed intelligent automation across the enterprise. This is about translating AI ambition into measurable business outcomes at scale.”

In the early going, the FinAI Hub has enabled up to 50% faster processing and an “approximately” 40% reduction in operating costs for AI-based commerce, according to the company.

The technology comes as the use of AI in shopping is growing at an ever faster clip, enticing developers to devise new forms of agentic commerce and technology companies to develop standards. Google Inc., for example, in January introduced its Universal Commerce Protocol, an open-source standard developed with major merchants such as Shopify, Walmart, and Target. The UPC follows the Agent Payments Protocol, which Google announced in September.

With such rules in place, agentic commerce could account for anywhere from 10% to 20% of U.S. e-commerce by 2030, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. Some 23% of U.S. consumers had made an AI-assisted purchase in the prior month, according to the research.