- Key insight: Fifth Third is adding AI-based navigation to its mobile banking app, though it is not a generative or agentic model.
- Supporting data: Fifth Third's mobile app has more than 2.4 million monthly users and supports more than 1 billion digital interactions each year.
- Forward look: The new model has begun rolling out to customers and will be fully available by the end of the month.
Fifth Third has added an AI-based navigational aid into its mobile banking app that the bank says helps customers find what they need and complete everyday financial tasks with fewer steps.
The bank has built 150 pre-populated options into the model, such as "activate card," which the customer taps to be guided directly to the most relevant place, whether that is a mobile screen for task completion, an AI-based chatbot, or live support from a Fifth Third representative.
The new feature, which is based on an open-source transformer model, was in design and research for about two years, then in pilot, according to Ben Hoffman, chief strategy officer and head of consumer products at Fifth Third. It generates a prediction of what the customer is looking to achieve.
"It continues to learn as customers leverage the channel," Hoffman told American Banker. "Every time a customer types something in, we see what they type, we see what they tap on. I can send it back into the model to make the model more accurate."
Fifth Third is not rushing to deploy generative or agentic AI to customers because it's found in its research that predictability and accuracy matter more to customers than interacting with a simulated human with a persona, Hoffman said. It's also found that customers are comfortable using the same screens they're accustomed to for everyday tasks.
"As soon as you go to that agentic model, you're walking away from the visual presentation of content that a customer sees every single time," Hoffman pointed out. "So if I want to send a Zelle, as an example, every time I go into the search interface, and I start typing Zelle, and then I tap on 'send Zelle,' it takes you to exactly the same flow, and there is discomfort in it from a customer perspective, as well as sort of security and confidence in it. So we're being very mindful of embracing the technology for its own sake, and instead meeting the customers where they are."
The new model uses natural language understanding to interpret customers' prompts and has been trained on hundreds of millions of customer interactions, according to Fifth Third.
"We view this as essentially meeting the customers where they are," Hoffman said. "Once we're able to get customers to engage in this type of interface, and interact in more natural language, as opposed to static screens and taps, that's one big hurdle. Then we have to make sure we understand what the customer is trying to achieve, that's the second big hurdle. Then the third part is agentic execution."
The coming AI agents will ride the same API rails as the mobile app does, "so that's actually the easiest piece to do from a technical perspective," Hoffman said. More challenging are building governance, kill switches and other controls, he said.
According to Hoffman, the new model is a first step toward changing the bank's digital interface from static screens and taps to customers using their own words to get things done.
"It seems like Fifth Third is using this opportunity to better understand what consumers type and look for, and use the signal to prioritize what and where to invest next in agentic AI," Theo Lau, CEO of consultancy Unconventional Ventures, told American Banker.
She notes that a useful enhancement will be one where consumers can type a question in their own words and chat the way they do with frontier AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Fifth Third's mobile app has more than 2.4 million monthly users and supports more than 1 billion digital interactions each year. In 2025, Fifth Third says it introduced more than 400 enhancements to the app.
The new model has begun rolling out to customers and will be fully available by the end of the month, the bank says.
