GenAI Adoption: Is Your CEO Asking You to Move Faster?
How Capital Markets Firms Can Accelerate Adoption
The pressure is real. CEOs across capital markets are asking: Why aren’t we moving faster with our GenAI initiatives? For the first time in years, the C-suite is giving operational leaders permission — even a mandate — to experiment, invest, and move with speed.
Yet despite this rare executive cover, many firms are stuck. Pilots proliferate but don’t scale. Data challenges resurface. Employees resist. Applications become outdated quickly. What looked like a sprint toward transformation starts to feel like a slog.
The window for leadership is open, but it won’t stay that way. Firms that move decisively now will set the industry standard. Those that hesitate will spend the next decade playing catch-up. Below we explore actions to address your CEO’s desire to move quickly.
1. Balance Sure Bets with Bold Bets: Build a Value-Driven Roadmap
Many firms scatter pilots too widely, chasing every new GenAI announcement. This creates noise, dilutes resources, and frustrates executives looking for tangible progress. The smarter move is to shape a portfolio of use cases that blends near-term “sure bets” with longer-horizon “bold bets.”
Sure Bets - Early, tangible wins: These are use cases that are easier to implement, carry manageable risk, and deliver measurable efficiency gains. They provide proof points executives can showcase:
Research copilots to summarize filings or earnings calls
Copilots to support SDLC deployment
Automated reporting for investor updates and compliance disclosures, reducing manual effort while improving accuracy
Productivity assistants embedded in Teams, Outlook, or Slack to draft emails or generate meeting notes
These typically deliver 10–30% productivity gains, freeing resources for higher-value work. More importantly, they get folks on board and start the learning curve.
Bold Bets - Transformational plays: Alongside tactical wins, firms must invest in initiatives that redefine competitiveness. These are initiatives where the tech stack and/or business process needs to be reinvented:
AI-assisted trading and portfolio insights to accelerate decision-making
Digital client advisors providing institutional clients with 24/7 intelligence
Redesigned onboarding journeys completed in days rather than weeks, reshaping the client experience
These require deeper investment in data, governance, and change management but offer outsized rewards in revenue growth, cost takeout, and client satisfaction.
A winning roadmap delivers results today while investing in the breakthroughs that will define tomorrow. Sure bets create momentum now. Bold bets position the firm for industry leadership later.
2. Align Expectations Along the Hype Curve
The GenAI narrative often promises overnight reinvention — but progress in financial services is more deliberate. Headlines may showcase dazzling breakthroughs, yet for most firms, the real gains arrive in increments. Even a 10–15% efficiency lift is significant: it can unlock millions in cost savings, release scarce talent from routine work, and accelerate client delivery.
Leaders must make these outcomes visible and reframe GenAI as a staged journey, not a one-off leap:
Stage 1: Productivity gains - Copilots and assistants that reduce manual effort and improve speed
Stage 2: Process redesign - Embedding AI throughout workflows to reshape how work gets done
Stage 3: New value creation - Entirely new products, services, and business models powered by AI at scale
Each phase takes time, investment, and organizational learning. By setting realistic milestones and communicating progress early—however modest—leaders keep boards and employees aligned, avoid hype-driven disappointment, and sustain confidence as the transformation unfolds.
3. Use GenAI as a Forcing Function for Data Strategy
Most firms see data quality and integration as barriers to GenAI — but they’re also one of the easiest places to start seeing value. Early GenAI use cases in data management, such as automated classification, normalization, deduplication, and document parsing can quickly improve accuracy, consistency, and accessibility across fragmented datasets. These quick wins free teams from tedious manual cleanup and build confidence in GenAI’s practical impact.
Crucially, the same GenAI tools that improve today’s data pipelines can accelerate tomorrow’s use cases. Cleaner, normalized, well-governed data reduces friction for everything that follows — research copilots, AI-enabled onboarding, automated reporting, and even AI-driven trading insights. Leaders should treat GenAI not just as a consumer of good data, but as an accelerator of data strategy itself:
Automate tagging, mapping, and standardization of client, transaction, and market data.
Integrate and reconcile front-, middle-, and back-office sources to provide enterprise-wide visibility.
Apply GenAI to monitor data quality continuously and flag anomalies for remediation.
This approach turns a common bottleneck — data readiness — into a catalyst. By making data-related GenAI projects the first wave of wins, firms can unlock faster adoption across higher-value use cases and scale GenAI more confidently enterprise-wide.
4. Use the CHRO as the Change Agent: Mobilize Talent and Culture at Scale
GenAI transformation will succeed or fail on people, not platforms. Even the best technology will gather dust without a workforce that feels confident and capable. That’s why the CHRO must be positioned as a central change agent. Unlike IT or strategy leaders, the CHRO has the levers to shape culture, redesign roles, and align incentives with the firm’s AI goals. Leading firms are:
Upskilling aggressively: From prompt engineering to AI-enabled research for analysts, supported by hackathons, certifications, and AI academies
Embedding AI into roles: Updating job descriptions and KPIs to make AI proficiency a baseline expectation
Addressing fears directly: Communicating openly that AI reduces drudge work, enhances collaboration, and unlocks higher-value activities
The CHRO can also create grassroots pull by appointing AI champions across departments and recognizing teams that pioneer new use cases. At the same time, they can align incentives with COOs and CIOs — embedding AI adoption targets into objectives and linking efficiency gains to recognition programs.
In short, the CHRO is not a supporting player but a critical leader of GenAI transformation. When culture, skills, and incentives align, employees view AI as an enabler, not a threat — accelerating adoption and making it sustainable.
Lead Boldly — or Fall Behind
Firms can’t just bolt GenAI onto outdated workflows — they need to redesign processes with AI at the core to unlock real value. Big structural changes, like AI-enabled onboarding and automated trade settlement, drive transformative impact but require investment. At the same time, quick wins such as auto-drafted client outreach or instant earnings-report summaries build confidence and momentum. This two-speed approach — bold reinvention plus quick, practical gains — helps firms innovate faster and avoid the biggest risk: inertia.
The GenAI race in capital markets is already underway. CEOs are providing rare executive cover to experiment and invest, but that window won’t last forever. Firms that hesitate risk being left behind — not only by faster competitors, but by their own talent, who will gravitate toward forward-looking cultures. Those who act now will shape tomorrow’s industry standards. Those who delay will find themselves struggling to catch up.
Want help jumpstarting that belief in your team? At BeaconAP, we blend AI strategy with cultural design—because we know real change takes both.
Let’s build something better, together.