AI in financial crime compliance: What’s the difference between AI agents and agentic AI?

If you work in anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance, you’re probably used to hearing about how the latest artificial intelligence (AI) tools will revolutionize your job. 

AI agents and agentic AI – two connected, but not interchangeable terms – are two of the latest buzzwords in compliance. In a September 2025 speech, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller praised the ability of agentic AI to facilitate faster and cheaper risk detection for financial institutions. A report from McKinsey around the same time highlighted financial crime risk management as one of the highest-potential areas for agentic AI applications. 

This is for good reason: agentic AI has a wide range of applications within compliance, including customer due diligence (CDD) and case management. However, given agentic AI’s fast rise to prominence in AML compliance, firms looking to upgrade their compliance tech stacks should beware of vendors exaggerating their capabilities – either through a lack of clarity about the distinction between AI agents and agentic AI, or by promising agentic systems that in reality only use simple automation. 

When evaluating AML solutions, you should instead be able to interrogate vendor claims and plan a detailed agentic AI roadmap for your firm. 

What’s the difference between AI agents and agentic systems?

Financial institutions (FIs) are quickly picking up on the transformative potential of agentic AI: in our State of Financial Crime 2026 survey of over 600 global compliance leaders, 73% said they were already using, piloting, or evaluating a vendor solution for customer screening, with 70% in the same position for transaction monitoring. 

However, with agentic AI adoption and technological development still in a relatively early state, the concept of “agentic AI” can refer either to individual AI agents or to more advanced and coordinated agentic systems. 

The critical importance of data for effective agentic AI adoption

Moving to a truly agentic system requires consistent access to large amounts of data, resulting in systems that are far more intelligent, autonomous, and intelligent than individual AI agents. 

Because of this, agentic capabilities are not just an overlay on existing software systems, but a way to fundamentally re-engineer how compliance works, with full-stack automation, dynamic risk scoring, and constant feedback loops to optimize essential processes. At ComplyAdvantage, our system is unique because it employs a single, connected model for all entities and relationships, enabling end-to-end explainability – tracing any agentic decision back to its original source.

As advanced AI adoption increasingly becomes the norm for financial crime risk management, firms with the most accurate, comprehensive, relevant, and organized data will be best positioned to control how agentic systems behave and take advantage of the significant efficiency gains they offer. 

Business brief: Agentic AI and AML compliance

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An AI roadmap for the compliance teams of the future 

Every firm’s AI adoption should be tailored to its specific profile and requirements, and will therefore look different. However, in general, the reality of human-AI collaboration will, for most, progress over three stages as firms move up the compliance “maturity curve” (see below): 

• Compliance analysts assign occasional, simple, repetitive tasks to AI tools (level four in the timeline below). 
• Compliance analysts are joined by agents as “digital colleagues”. These agents undertake specific tasks under human instruction, but without requiring direct supervision (level five). 
• With full-stack automation in place, agentic systems carry out multiple essential workflows, with human compliance teams setting the overall strategic direction and monitoring outcomes (level six). The frontier here is predictive compliance – taking action before a risk materializes rather than merely reacting to it.

The business advantage of agentic AI in AML compliance

In our State of Financial Crime 2026 survey, increased efficiency, improved customer experiences, and faster resolution times were among the most cited benefits firms had seen or were expecting to see from adopting agentic AI. Rather than being siloed compliance outcomes, these benefits have significant effects on wider business goals, turning compliance into a strategic driver of growth. 

Firms adopting agentic AI for compliance, including by preparing to progressively upgrade their tech stacks to accommodate new capabilities, can expect to:  

• Reduce regulatory and reputational risks: With agents constantly at work sourcing the latest risk data, such as real-time sanctions updates, which we ingest in under a minute, and screening customers against it, you can remove gaps in traditional compliance processes and become aware of risks as soon as they occur. 
• Achieve faster growth: Agentic systems are designed for scalability and flexibility, enabling you to onboard customers and process transactions more efficiently with seamlessly automated workflows. This allows you to grow your customer acquisition rate without needing to allocate more resources to compliance just to keep up with demand. 
• Optimize your efficiency: Even with the higher alert volumes generated by scaling your business, agentic CDD and case remediation result in fewer false positives flooding your systems and fewer cases requiring manual review from your analysts. Our agents remediate 65-85% of false positives without human intervention, resulting in a 85-90% productivity improvement for L1 analysts.

Unlock your compliance team with agentic AI case remediation

Customer Screening and Ongoing Monitoring on Mesh includes agentic case remediation capabilities, working 24/7 to clear the noise that paralyzes compliance teams by:

• Automating low-risk remediation in a matter of seconds.
• Providing intrinsic transparency by generating clear, auditable reasoning and confidence scores for every decision stored in an immutable, secure audit log.
• Escalating only the truly ambiguous cases, guaranteeing that human expertise is deployed where intuition and moral judgment are required.

This shift is not about replacing compliance teams; it is about empowering them to do the highest-value work. The evidence is clear:

• Massive cost reductions: By transferring the high-volume, low-judgment workload to an agentic system, our customers are achieving up to 85% cost reduction and seeing analyst burnout significantly drop.
• Backlog elimination: 24/7 automated triage consistently clears open case backlogs, enabling teams to be truly proactive.
• Guaranteed auditability: Because our agentic AI solution is built natively on our proprietary data and within the Mesh platform, every action is traceable, providing the intrinsic transparency that satisfies both internal and external auditors.