Valeria Vorobyova: Banks That Fail to Restructure Their Management Around AI Will Lose Their Competitive Edge

At the fourth practical conference, “AI-Banking_26: From Initiative to System,” financial market experts and leaders of the tech community discussed why pilot AI projects in banks are no longer providing a competitive advantage and what is needed for technology to begin transforming the business model itself.

Valeria Vorobyova, CEO of the AI Alliance, spoke about cross-industry practices that have already proven effective in other sectors of the economy and can be applied to the banking sector. These include: AI-driven business process reengineering, real-time data-driven management, and a platform-based approach to developing AI infrastructure.

According to Vorobyova, the industry has reached a point where traditional automation no longer provides a competitive advantage. The winners will be those players who can restructure the very logic of bank management.

“Some banks will become more efficient capital management systems, while others will remain a set of processes with rising costs. AI isn’t about automation. It’s about who can manage the bank’s finances better. And in this sense, it’s no longer a technological race, but a competition between management models,” emphasized Valeria Vorobyova.

As the Alliance noted, the key challenge for banks today lies not in launching individual AI solutions, but in their ability to integrate them into their business model in a way that yields measurable and sustainable results. To achieve this, banks need to review their organizational structures, shift the balance of responsibility among departments, and develop new approaches to performance evaluation, risk management, and strategic planning.

Following the discussion, it became clear that the banking sector is entering a phase where AI is transforming not just individual processes, but the very logic of decision-making itself; those who do not begin to restructure their management model now will have to catch up under different conditions.