The financial services sector is ramping up AI adoption to bolster resilience in the wake of a spate of major IT outages, new research suggests.
According to PagerDuty’s 2025 State of Digital Operations report, four-in-ten (38%) financial services companies believe that generative AI can improve operational efficiency and help improve their IT service performance.
When it comes to outages and digital resilience, 84% of financial services leaders said they believe agentic AI will be rolled out in either a core or peripheral capacity over the next one to two years.
Tech leaders in the sector did identify significant hurdles, however, including potential budgetary constraints for development, and concerns over determining return on investment (ROI) – an issue that has become a key talking point at organizations across a range of sectors.
The sector also faces challenges in identifying potential automation use cases – cited by a 35% of financial services respondents – alongside an equal number who hold data security concerns.
Despite this, financial services firms are reassessing their technology strategies and aiming to boost IT budgets to accommodate AI solutions.
Three-quarters said they are already optimizing or innovating with AI, for example.. In terms of budget, expansion plans are focused on process automation and AIOps, both on the list for two-thirds.
Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA at PagerDuty, said financial services must consider the potential benefits AI can offer in terms of operational resilience.
“Financial services firms have learned painful lessons from ongoing and repeated widescale IT outages,” Crespo said.
“Not only have the economic costs of incidents stacked up in the last year, but also customers are willing to churn if they cannot have real-time online transaction and account access. Failure to deliver 24/7 service damages regulatory obligations and customer trust.”
Financial services eyes deeper data insights
More than four-in-ten (45%) financial services leaders told PagerDuty they see AI as key to providing higher quality data insights, with a third (33%) also noting its potential to improve customer experiences and team collaboration.
The report comes in the context of recent UK Treasury data showing that nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK totted up more than 803 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages over the last two years.
And that figure doesn’t include the most recent outages affecting Barclays customers between 31 January and 2 February along with various banks on 28 February.
The Treasury marked at least 158 banking IT failure incidents affecting millions of customers’ ability to access and use services between January 2023 and February 2025.
“With challenges to service delivery underscored by the Treasury Committee’s numbers, we’re seeing an acceleration in how financial service leaders restructure their technology architecture and embed resilient incidence management capabilities coupled with AI,” said Crespo.
“The application of AI to detect and diagnose disruptive events is a concrete use case that warns firms before outages occur, allowing predictive and preventive maintenance, or softening the impact of unplanned events.”
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