According to Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, the financial services industry is moving past simple prompt-and-response interfaces toward agentic AI, which is capable of autonomously orchestrating multi-step settlements or compliance audits. Borden explains that while copilots have augmented human decision-making at the UI layer, agentic AI moves intelligence deeper into the system of record and system of action, orchestrating end-to-end workflows where agents can reason, access data, and execute across multiple systems. He states that AI is becoming a new factor of production, requiring a fundamentally different stack that brings together data grounding, orchestration, and governance, as seen in platforms like Microsoft Azure AI enabling multi-agent workflows grounded in enterprise data. Borden also highlights an emerging trend toward "headless" banking driven by open protocols, noting that agents are driving how financial products are consumed. He says Microsoft is adding open agentic protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to every layer of its product stack, enabling customers and partners to build agents directly off the tech stack.