AI agents are about to change finance, and Fidelity has a warning

A major financial institution has published research suggesting that AI systems are on the verge of becoming active participants in financial markets, without requiring human oversight. Fidelity Digital Assets highlights that AI agents could execute trades, arrange loans, manage portfolios, and process payments with minimal human direction.

The report emphasizes that increased activity does not guarantee more value for the supporting systems. Fidelity argues that AI agents will not merely assist financial professionals; they will operate as independent participants, continuously processing market information and acting on it without human intervention at each step.

Areas such as trading, lending, and portfolio management, which involve high decision volumes and substantial fees, are expected to see the most immediate impact from this shift. However, payments, despite potentially having higher volumes, may generate less economic value for the infrastructure supporting them. The research also raises concerns about the competitive advantage.

If AI agents can swiftly shift between financial platforms, optimizing for cost and execution quality, it may not translate into durable value for any single platform. Instead, the platform providing AI agents with the most reliable access to liquidity, data, and settlement could gain a significant edge. Fidelity identifies AI-driven trading, lending, and portfolio management as areas with the highest economic impact, as AI can operate at a speed and scale unmatched by human teams.

These capabilities include evaluating risk, synthesizing market signals, identifying pricing inefficiencies, and rebalancing positions across multiple assets. This shift could benefit both institutional and retail investors, as AI-powered agents would continuously manage capital within predefined objectives, even during non-business hours.

For financial institutions, AI agents could streamline credit evaluation, match borrowers to lenders, price risk in real time, and adjust loan terms based on changing conditions, leading to faster capital deployment, lower defaults, and reduced operational costs. The report also warns about the gap between AI's increased activity and value creation.

More transactions do not automatically mean more economic benefit for the financial infrastructure. The real asset driving future value is machine-to-machine settlement, which currently receives less attention. As AI systems increasingly transact with one another, buying computing resources, data access, and services from other automated systems, the platform able to effectively handle machine-to-machine payments may emerge as the dominant force in the AI-in-finance era.