Why AI Training Often Falls Short for Financial Services Executives (And What Actually Works)

According to McKinsey, companies attributing 5% or more of their profits to AI are high performers that share distinct characteristics:¹

• They redesign workflows around AI
• They scale faster
• They invest more boldly
• They’re 3x more likely to have senior leaders who role-model AI use themselves 

If you’re an executive in banking, financial services, or insurance (BFSI), this capability can be developed through AI training. The challenge, however, is that current AI education for senior leaders is too broad, generic, and theory-based.

This leaves you without the relevant context needed to lead successful AI adoption and become one of these high-performing companies. As a result, aligning how generative AI (GenAI) and agentic systems apply to your financial institution or addressing employee concerns can be a struggle. 

And when you can’t communicate your AI vision in a credible, practical way, middle managers and their teams are more likely to resist and lack the motivation to adopt any kind of AI tools you introduce.

Neurons Lab has over 6 years of experience deploying AI across organizations, including Fortune 500 companies. Through years of working with financial services leaders, it’s clear that executive AI capability is not built on theory alone.

In this article, we cover:

• Where Current AI Training for BFSI Executives Falls Short 
• What Effective AI Training Looks Like for BFSI Leaders
• How a Regional Branch of a G-SIB Raised Awareness, Motivation, and Adoption with Executive AI Training Designed by Neurons Lab
• Why Partner With Neurons Lab For AI Training Tailored to Financial Services Executives 

Want AI executive training that goes beyond generic narratives and helps you build a competitive advantage? Book a call with us today.

Where Current AI Training for BFSI Executives Falls Short 

You may have signed up for AI training that initially looked great on paper: a well-known provider, a compelling agenda, and a tour of the latest tools. But once back in your day-to-day operations, you still couldn’t answer, “What does this mean for our priorities, our risk posture, and our operating model?” 

Without the right knowledge of artificial intelligence and how it applies to your financial services sector, you may have even lacked the language and confidence to mobilize middle managers. This means your AI adoption stalled before it even started. 

That disconnect is a common theme we hear from BFSI leaders. Much of today’s AI training often stops short of what you need most, which is practical judgment and decision making about where AI fits in your institution, which constraints matter, and what to do next. 

That’s because AI training for BFSI executives:

Isn’t Specific to The Financial Services Industry 

Many AI training programs for leaders tend to focus on a wide range of industries rather than financial services specifically. Unfortunately, this means it does not reflect the regulatory and operational constraints you face as a financial institution. 

For example, as a BFSI executive, you need to make decisions within strict privacy and security regulatory frameworks, such as GDPR or strong customer authentication expectations in payments. There are also increasing requirements around AI explainability and auditability, and a very low tolerance for errors, as they can lead to major financial losses and reputational damage. If it’s not industry-specific, AI training won’t teach you how to address these risks, making it unlikely to justify your time investment.

Is Overly-focused on Tools Your Bank or Institution Can’t Use

AI training often promotes specific third-party tools or platforms. However, as a BFSI leader, this is problematic as you often can’t use commercial tools without prior compliance approval. Additionally, strict industry regulations often mean data residency and cross-border transfer constraints may limit where you can process or store data. 

For instance, if you’re a global bank, you may be restricted from using public AI technologies or tools with customer or confidential information. Instead, you may require private deployments or internally hosted open source models like Mistral. Training that doesn’t take these requirements into account can leave you without a realistic path to deploying AI in your own organization.

Is Rarely Tailored to Your Financial Services Institution

Even when a program includes ‘financial services examples’, it’s not designed to understand your specific organization. Generic courses don’t have the context, time, resources, or expertise needed to assess your business model, risk exposure, or operating constraints.

As a result, standard AI training for senior leaders can rarely account for your organization’s unique characteristics.

Let’s say you’re a retail bank. You face different opportunities than a commercial lender focused on underwriting and portfolio monitoring, or an insurer modernizing claims and fraud. If training isn’t tailored to where AI could realistically create business value for you, investing in the right use cases and reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence can be challenging. 

Tends to Overlook Competitive Context

Many AI training and courses rely on well-known global case studies, such as Netflix’s personalization or Amazon’s recommendation-driven growth. These examples are often impressive but not relevant to your region or peer set. You rarely see what your direct competitors in the same region are doing with AI. 

For example, training might look at large technology companies instead of local financial institutions adopting AI for customer onboarding or relationship management. Without this crucial competitive context, training isn’t strategically relevant and may not provide enough motivation to act.

Doesn’t Prepare You for Continuous Change 

Although AI is evolving rapidly, current AI training for executives might not prepare you for ongoing change. Because this training is often generic and unrelated to what’s actively happening in practice, it can lag behind new developments in artificial intelligence. And by the time these advances reach mainstream training programs, early opportunities may have already passed.

Advances such as agentic AI for financial services are already moving from pilots toward broader enterprise experimentation, for instance. 

Without forward-looking insights and expert-led visibility into AI agent development and emerging technologies, you can’t adapt your strategies quickly. You also miss out on early operational benefits, such as reducing operating costs ahead of your challenger banks or launching AI-enabled wealth management co-pilots earlier.  

Can Be More Theoretical than Practical

Many academic and online programs emphasize credentials (e.g., certificate of completion) and focus on theoretical concepts, rather than practical skills. While this foundation helps, it rarely builds the practical know-how leaders need to role-model AI use and make adoption decisions with confidence.

For example, you may learn about prompt engineering, but not how to apply it to realistic company-specific tasks like summarizing a risk memo or analyzing a performance report. Without hands-on interaction, your understanding of AI remains limited. And when you can’t demonstrate credible day-to-day use, it’s harder to motivate middle managers and normalize adoption across teams.

Doesn’t Provide Actionable Next Steps 

Many AI trainings succeed in building awareness, but stop short of preparing BFSIs leaders for what happens next: a practical path to implementing AI-driven solutions safely and successfully across your organization. 

Often, generic training fails to: 

• Guide you through the complexities of systems, data, and governance in a regulated environment.
• Help you build the internal capabilities and frameworks you need to manage AI initiatives responsibly over time.
• Provide clear adoption roadmaps or guidance on how to phase implementation across multiple functions.

What Effective AI Training Looks Like for BFSI Business Leaders

Effective executive AI training designed for financial services goes beyond awareness building. It equips leaders to make better decisions in a regulated environment, and to mobilize the organization around a clear, credible AI agenda.

At a minimum, it helps you:

• Motivate middle management and address practical concerns about adoption.
• Understand and prioritize business applications for your individual organization based on value, feasibility, data readiness, and risk.
• Identify your competitive position and where you can gain an edge with AI (or even catch up to challenger institutions that are already adopting AI). 

Here’s what effective AI training for financial services executives looks like in practice:

Covers Use Cases and Risks Relevant to the Financial Services Industry 

Effective AI training for executives helps you understand how AI works in banking, wealth and asset management, and insurance. It also covers relevant business applications like fraud detection, AML/KYC automation, credit risk modeling, and regulatory reporting. 

As a result, you can separate hype from realistic opportunities. You also get an AI perspective on the industry’s strict compliance requirements around data security, AI auditability, and traceability. 

That way, you can make informed decisions around AI governance from the start. This includes setting up evaluation frameworks to mitigate risks like hallucinations and bias, or establishing documentation and audit trails rather than facing costly overhauls later.

Focuses on the Tools Your Bank or Institution Can Use

Unlike training that leans too heavily on specific off-the-shelf commercial tools like ChatGPT Business or Claude for Finance, a more effective training approach accounts for your firm-specific requirements. This could be data residency, compliance, or vendor restrictions.

So, if you’re restricted from using certain tools due to security reasons, a financial-services-specific training can guide you through open source models, or private deployments via OpenAI, Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, so infrastructure and data controls remain in your hands.

Similarly, suppose you have to ensure your data stays within your geographical boundaries to comply with local regulations. The right training can help you understand which deployment options meet your data residency requirements to ensure data remains locally hosted. This way, you don’t waste time exploring models and tools you can’t deploy in your organization, and you leave with a realistic path to AI implementation.

Helps You See How AI can Create Value Specifically for your Firm 

AI training that’s tailored to your institution’s unique characteristics helps you understand where artificial intelligence can improve key business functions based on your:

• Business model
• Regulatory exposure
• Current resources
• Capabilities
• Operating constraints 

Customized executive education takes into account your sector’s workflows, business strategy, lines of business, and representative scenarios, and the challenges you deal with daily. This means you see relevant solutions immediately, without having to translate abstract concepts into your context. 

It also means you can prioritize the right use cases, scale initiatives faster, and shorten time-to-value. With this clarity on AI’s potential for your organization, you can confidently advocate for and drive its adoption among middle managers and employees. 

Provides Competitive Context to Your AI Strategy

AI training that looks at your competitive landscape reveals what your rivals are doing with AI across onboarding, service, fraud, credit, claims, and operations. This helps you spot gaps in their approaches and uncover feasible opportunities they’ve missed. 

For example, competitor analysis might reveal that your closest rival still relies on legacy KYC processes requiring 3-5 days and multiple document submissions. This presents an opportunity for you to implement AI-powered identity verification that cuts onboarding to mere minutes.

Delivers Evidence-Based Predictions for Strategic Planning

AI training that helps you anticipate how AI will change your industry and key business functions over the next 3-5 years puts you in a better position to plan. 

With key AI predictions grounded in real-world developments (e.g., what leading institutions are piloting, what major vendors are releasing, and where regulators are focusing on), you can start to allocate your resources where it matters. You’ll stay up to date with the right talent, data foundations, governance, and use cases as AI capabilities evolve. 

This helps you act earlier than your competitors. It can also provide first-mover advantages, such as reducing long-term operating costs. Research by McKinsey shows that pioneers in AI can gain a 4% return on tangible equity (ROTE) while slow movers risk being locked into an uncompetitive cost base. 

Prioritizes Hands-on Practice with AI

AI training that incorporates relevant practice with AI ensures you understand AI’s potential firsthand and become a credible role model for your organization. For example, it includes guided exercises on realistic leadership tasks, such as drafting and refining communications, summarizing reports, generating first-pass presentations, and pressure-testing outputs for accuracy, risk, and tone.

This kind of visible leadership learning also fosters the trust essential for AI adoption across the entire business. In high-trust organizations, leaders can: 

• Clearly explain why AI adoption is a priority. 
• Model how AI tools can enable teams rather than replace them.

As a result, employees are over 2x more likely to feel comfortable using AI tools compared to those in low-trust organizations.

Provides Actionable Frameworks and Next Steps 

Instead of ending on awareness and leaving you wondering, ‘What’s next?’, AI training designed for financial services provides you with clear next steps for translating knowledge into action, allowing you to move from ideas to initiatives and execution aligned to your organization’s strategic priorities.

Because the training focuses on the actual decisions, risks, trade-offs, and blockers you’re likely to face during your own deployment, you’ll have the tools to act. This includes clear roadmaps with specific frameworks and mental models for moving through each stage, including building awareness, moving into implementation, establishing governance, and scaling responsibly.

How a Regional Branch of a G-SIB Raised AI Awareness, Motivation, and Adoption with Executive Training Designed by Neurons Lab

The Vietnamese branch of a global bank approached Neurons Lab seeking an experienced, neutral external partner to increase AI awareness at the executive level. The goal was not to launch new AI projects, but to help executives understand AI and support adoption of the bank’s own internal AI tools.

Previous AI trainings had focused heavily on theoretical concepts rather than practical application and failed to motivate executives. The bank also required training that reflected the realities of financial services institutions, particularly strict regulations and data restrictions limiting the use of commercial AI tools.

Neurons Lab designed an executive AI training workshop for 50 of the bank’s participants, including heads of business units, procurement, compliance, customer experience, and other senior leaders. 

The training covered:

1. AI Foundations: Executives were introduced to how AI works using metaphors that are understandable for senior stakeholders and management. As shown in the image below, we started from the foundations, including a brief look at the history of AI, how it has evolved, and where today’s agent-based systems come from, going back nearly 100 years. This approach helped leaders build a fundamental understanding without relying on overly technical explanations.

2. Strategic AI outlook: We looked at where AI is headed, reviewed AI performance benchmarks, and tracked progression over recent years. We also explored how AI’s evolving capabilities are impacting the banking sector, as shown below.

This helped executives understand AI’s current possibilities.

3. Competitive intelligence: We conducted a competitive analysis of local and regional banks in Vietnam, enabling executives to see how competitors were deploying AI and identify opportunities. For example, we discovered that competitors couldn’t replicate the bank’s network in 5 years, while the bank itself could replicate competitors’ speed in 6+ months with AI. This highlighted a clear strategic opportunity for AI adoption.

4. Executive AI literacy and hands-on practice: Executives learned key AI concepts and immediately applied them through prompt engineering exercises across text, image, and video. The exercises were tailored to HSBC and included real scenarios such as generating marketing ads.

5. BFSI use cases and an AI implementation roadmap: We reviewed potential use cases across the bank’s wealth management, corporate banking, and private banking divisions. Our session ended with governance frameworks, industry outlooks, and a 30 to 90-day action plan.

Because of our practical approach, the bank’s senior executives:

• Built AI literacy through hands-on learning experience.
• We’re more engaged and motivated about AI than with previous courses.
• Left better prepared and more confident to champion internal AI tool adoption with middle management and their teams.

Why Partner With Neurons Lab For AI Training for Executives 

Neurons Lab is a UK and Singapore-based Agentic AI consultancy serving financial institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia.  As an AI enablement partner, we design, build, and implement agentic AI solutions tailored for mid-to-large BFSIs operating in highly regulated environments, including banks, insurers, and wealth management firms. 

Trusted by 100+ clients, such as HSBC, Visa, and AXA, we co-create agentic systems that run in production and scale across your organization. Our experience informs every aspect of our executive AI training, differentiating it from mainstream academic or online AI courses.

Because we’re specialized in both AI and financial services, training focuses on how AI systems actually work in production environments. It also reflects the BFSI-specific challenges you face, including infrastructure constraints and strict compliance requirements. 

Rather than abstract trends, we cover emerging AI capabilities, your competitors, and use cases already being tested in real financial services settings. We also focus on real practice, like trying prompts, generating outputs, or analyzing reports during each session. This way, you see what’s possible with AI and remember it. 

Our training takes half a day to one day, not weeks or months, and can be done live—virtually or on-site in your offices. This ensures you concentrate on the practical aspects and walk away with clear frameworks, mental models, and next steps for evaluating, governing, and scaling AI responsibly.

This combination of AI specialization, financial services expertise, and our proven track record of deploying AI solutions ensures you get practical AI leadership enablement, not just theory.

Choose Personalized AI Training that Empowers Executives with Practical Skills

As a BFSI executive, personalized, practical AI training can help you steer your organization towards becoming a high AI performer. This kind of AI training isn’t one size fits all and goes beyond theory. Instead, it’s highly specific to your organizational context. This provides the strategic clarity, frameworks, and firsthand experience needed to champion AI across your management and teams. To realize these benefits, it’s important to work with an AI-exclusive consultancy that has deep financial services expertise. 

Unlike academic institutions, business schools, on-campus courses, and online course providers, an experienced partner grounds training in real-world scenarios, regulatory realities, and proven BFSI use cases. This enables you to move confidently from understanding AI to deploying it successfully.

If you’re a BFSI interested in AI executive training that’s relevant, practical, and designed to help you deploy AI successfully, Neurons Lab can help. Book a call with us today.

Sources:

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai