US companies dominate as banks race to adopt AI

The leading banks for AI maturity have pulled away from their peers in 2025, consolidating earlier gains and increasingly realizing ROI for their AI investments.

The latest AI Index from intelligence and benchmarking platform for AI adoption in financial services, Evident, shows JPMorganChase, Capital One and Royal Bank of Canada are the three leading banks in AI adoption.

The annual Evident AI Index evaluates the ongoing AI performance of 50 major banks in North America, Europe, and APAC against 70+ indicators drawn from millions of public data points. It shows that the top 10 banks are accelerating AI adoption over twice as fast as the rest of the field as their early AI investments translate into business value.

The top 10 is increasingly dominated by US-headquartered institutions, but RBC, UBS and HSBC continue to secure places among the global leaders as the top performers in Canada, Europe and the UK respectively. Although four out of five UK banks rank in the top half of the Index no UK bank places in the top 10 for AI talent.

Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and CEO of Evident, says:

Banking is one of the most advanced and competitive industries on the planet when it comes to developing and rolling out AI at scale.

While some have described recent history as ‘The Summer AI Turned Ugly’, in the banking industry a different story is playing out. We’re beginning to see clear signs that AI investment is starting to translate into tangible financial gains, both in terms of efficiency and, increasingly, via new revenue opportunities. Banks and their shareholders expect ROI to accelerate over the next few years, and those in our top 10 are in pole position to see their efforts come to fruition.

Twice as many banks report a total number of active AI use cases (jumping from 12 to 25 banks since last year), and 32 out of 50 have disclosed at least one use case with an associated financial or non-financial impact -- up from 26 in 2024.

While more banks are reporting returns at the use-case level, only a small group have quantified the performance of their AI portfolios at Group level. Today, eight banks are disclosing portfolio-level ROI estimates -- either realized or projected -- with just three reporting both.

Annabel Ayles, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, says:

All banks -- regardless of size -- are increasing their AI budgets, and our data shows virtually every key metric of AI adoption increasing.

We're already seeing these investments translate into tangible examples of use cases deployment. And our discussions with banking leaders suggest they’re expecting to see material, reportable AI returns in the next 12-18 months. Our data strongly suggests that this achievement is imminent. The question is: how big will the returns be? If they exceed expectations, current AI investment levels could pale in comparison to what comes next.

The full index is available from the Evident site.

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