Agentic AI for BFSI with Sai Dheeraj Gummadi

Agentic AI is moving beyond demos and generic assistants into banking, financial services, and insurance. But building a useful BFSI system requires much more than connecting an LLM to a prompt.

A production-oriented AI system must understand the business workflow, work with real-world data, preserve evidence, perform critical calculations reliably, respect policy boundaries, handle failures, support human review, and remain explainable when its output influences a financial decision.

Agentic AI for BFSI presents a practical approach to designing such systems through four detailed case studies:

Financial Document Data Extraction Agent

Transform financial PDFs and tables into structured, traceable data while handling document layouts, periods, units, and validation.

Credit Risk Assessment Agent

Combine borrower documents, financial analysis, deterministic calculations, risk scoring, stress analysis, and credit-review workflows.

HNI Customer Onboarding Agent

Work through customer information, identity, ownership structures, screening signals, due-diligence evidence, and controlled risk assessment.

Investment Research and Portfolio Monitoring

Combine holdings and market data with deterministic analysis, portfolio constraints, research generation, and reviewer oversight.

The case studies are presented as interview-style system-design conversations. Each begins with an intentionally incomplete business problem. The candidate must ask the right questions to discover stakeholders, requirements, data, constraints, decision boundaries, and success metrics. The interviewer then challenges the proposed solution with alternatives, edge cases, failures, scaling concerns, and production constraints.

The book takes the reader through the complete journey:

Business Context → Requirements → Data and Evidence → Solution Strategy → Pipeline Logic → High-Level Design → Low-Level Design → Data Modeling → Evaluation → Deployment → Production Controls

You will learn how to:

• Decide when an AI agent is appropriate and when a fixed workflow is better
• Separate LLM responsibilities from deterministic calculations, scoring, rules, and constraints
• Design retrieval, tool calling, validation, orchestration, and human-review workflows
• Design APIs, databases, state management, and audit trails
• Handle missing information, conflicting evidence, failures, retries, and reruns
• Evaluate AI systems for accuracy, groundedness, reliability, cost, and latency
• Distinguish implemented functionality from proposed production architecture
• Explain and defend architectural trade-offs in system-design and technical interviews

The central principle throughout the book is simple:

Use AI where interpretation is valuable. Use deterministic software where correctness and control are required. Keep authorized professionals accountable for consequential decisions.

This book is written for AI engineers, software engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, architects, consultants, BFSI professionals, students, and interview candidates who want to move beyond generic AI demonstrations and understand how complete AI-enabled financial systems are designed.