Can Citigroup Catch Up in Wall Street’s AI Arms Race?

Citigroup has begun its largest test to date of artificial intelligence in the workplace. This month the bank rolled out a pilot of agentic AI inside its proprietary platform, Citi Stylus Workspaces, involving 5,000 employees. The new tools allow staff to direct an AI system to complete multi-step tasks with a single prompt, such as researching a client, pulling data from internal and external sources, and translating the findings into another language.

Chief Technology Officer David Griffiths said the company believes the models are finally ready for this kind of work. “A couple of years ago, you could do agentic things with the early versions of the models that were available then. But they weren’t always very reliable. They weren’t always very good at invoking tools. But they are now,” Griffiths said to Wall Street Journal.

The pilot will run for four to six weeks. Citi is measuring how employees use the system, how much productivity it drives, and whether the costs stay manageable. Running AI agents can become expensive as tasks lengthen and involve more data. Griffiths said the company has built cost controls into the system and will monitor the balance between value and usage.

The platform is built to work with multiple models, including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Citi has also integrated the tools directly with its own data and systems, such as employee directories and project management software. In practice, that means an employee can compress several separate steps into one request. Griffiths offered an example: a banker could ask the system to profile a client, aggregate internal and public information, and prepare a report in Spanish. all in a single flow.