The power of agentic AI for AML operations

Key takeaways

1. Agentic AI transforms AML operations: Traditional AML models with manual processes and static rules are no longer sufficient for handling the scale, speed, and sophistication of financial crime. Agentic AI employs autonomous agents (like Sensa Agents) that can automate entire investigative workflows, adapt to evolving threats, and collaborate with human investigators.
2. Enhanced productivity and accuracy: Sensa Agents automate repetitive tasks such as case summarization, SAR drafting, and web research, freeing investigators to focus on strategic decision-making. This leads to more accurate detection, reduced false positives, and faster investigation times.
3. Self-learning and continuous improvement: Agentic AI systems, like Sensa Agents, are designed to learn from each case and investigator feedback, continuously refining their detection and recommendation capabilities to align with institutional policies and evolving regulatory requirements.
4. Transparency and governance: These AI agents operate under strict governance, are fully auditable, and provide clear, explainable outputs. Human investigators have oversight and can intervene at any stage, ensuring regulatory confidence and responsible automation.
5. Scalable and cost-effective solutions: Sensa Agents are cloud-native, enabling instant scalability without heavy infrastructure costs. They facilitate cross-domain collaboration for a unified view of risk, support proactive risk management, and offer a more agile and cost-effective approach for financial institutions facing growing regulatory and operational challenges.

Sensa Agents can rapidly improve AML compliance 

The volume of transactions is exploding, payment speeds are accelerating, and criminal networks are adopting ever-more sophisticated methods to move illicit funds. No, this isn’t the latest Hollywood thriller, but real life, occurring in the offices of financial institutions all over the world. Compliance teams are under pressure to detect and disrupt more threats, faster than ever, and with fewer false positives. All while managing operational costs and satisfying increasingly demanding regulators. 

The traditional anti-money laundering (AML) operating model with static rules and manual investigations simply can’t keep up. But there is a solution – agentic AI. This new generation of artificial intelligence uses autonomous AI agents to execute complex investigative tasks end-to-end, adapt to evolving threats, and collaborate seamlessly with human investigators. 

Sensa Risk Intelligence (SRI), SymphonyAI’s cloud-native financial crime prevention platform, is pioneering this shift. Its Sensa Agents deliver agentic AI at scale, automating investigative workflows, enriching cases in real time, and enabling compliance teams to focus on strategic risk assessment. 

From copilots to autonomous agents 

Agentic AI takes two main forms: 

• Copilots assist human investigators, executing predefined tasks or answering prompts. 
• Autonomous AI Agents operate independently within defined parameters, making decisions, executing workflows, and learning from each ‘human-in-the-loop’ interaction. 

While copilots support investigators, autonomous AI agents – like Sensa Agents – take the lead in automating entire investigative process. They can summarize complex cases, draft suspicious activity reports (SARs), conduct comprehensive web research, and connect to internal and external data sources, all without requiring manual step-by-step oversight. 

Importantly, Sensa Agents aren’t black boxes. They are fully configurable, trained on an institution’s own policies and procedures, and operate under strict governance with human-in-the-loop oversight at any stage. Every decision is logged, auditable, and explainable. 

10 ways agentic AI transforms AML operations 

“Until now, AI models such as large language models (LLMs) have performed tasks including generating text and summarizing documents, but they haven’t been able to take action by themselves on their own ‘initiative.’ Instead, they’ve acted on your prompts. Agentic AI is changing that.” - Gartner 

Sometimes it can be hard to visualize exactly how new technology can enhance an industry. With that in mind, here are 10 ways that agentic AI transforms AML operations. 

1. Enhanced capability across the organization

Traditional AML systems are often overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of modern financial activity. Agentic AI like Sensa Agents use advanced analytics, machine learning, and data orchestration to process vast transaction flows in milliseconds. In this way, they identify hidden risks and anomalies that human teams might miss. 

For example, the Sensa Summary Agent can instantly consolidate KYC data, account histories, and network connections into a coherent overview. This eliminates hours of manual information gathering, giving investigators immediate context. 

2. Improved productivity through automation

In many AML teams, highly skilled investigators spend much of their time on repetitive administrative tasks. Autonomous AI agents change this process. 

For instance, the Sensa Narrative Agent can draft a high-quality, regulator-ready SAR narrative in seconds, incorporating human and AI-identified material. This ensures consistent quality while freeing investigators to focus on analysis and decision-making. 

Similarly, the Sensa Web Research Agent automates comprehensive background checks, connecting to external data sources and internal systems to uncover adverse media or hidden associations. This dramatically accelerates the review of potential false positives. 

3. Self-learning and continuous improvement

Criminal tactics evolve constantly, making adaptability a critical requirement for AML tools. Sensa Agents are built on self-learning systems that improve with each case they process, refining detection patterns and investigative recommendations based on investigator feedback. 

This continuous improvement ensures that AI agents continually align with an institution’s unique risk appetite and the evolving regulatory environment. 

4. Transparency and trust for regulators and stakeholders

Explainability is non-negotiable in AML. Each AI Agent works within clear parameters, provides a rationale for its outputs, and is governed by robust model management controls. 

This level of transparency reassures both internal stakeholders and regulators that automation is being used responsibly and in a controlled, auditable manner. It also means compliance leaders can confidently integrate the likes of Sensa Agents into critical workflows without fear of regulatory pushback. 

5. Real-time adaptability to new threats

When new money laundering techniques or fraud patterns emerge, autonomous AI Agents can be rapidly updated to detect them. This is in days, not weeks. This agility stands in stark contrast to traditional detection systems, where rule changes or new workflows can take months to deploy. 

Because agents are highly flexible and adaptable, institutions can roll out targeted capabilities quickly, without disrupting existing systems or operations. 

6. Superior accuracy and a reduction in false positives

False positives remain one of AML’s biggest operational burdens – over 95% of transaction alerts are false positives. Agentic AI improves accuracy by cross-validating findings, combining multiple signals before escalating a case. 

This multi-agent approach means fewer unnecessary manual reviews and higher SAR conversion rates. It also frees up capacity to focus on genuinely high-risk alerts, improving both operational efficiency and investigative depth. 

7. Increased intelligence and strategic insight

Agentic AI doesn’t just detect threats but generates actionable intelligence. By analyzing patterns across transactions, geographies, counterparties, and typologies, Sensa Agents feed valuable insights into broader risk management strategies. 

For example, by tracking how specific money laundering patterns evolve across regions (from Australia to the Middle East, for example), institutions can pre-emptively adjust controls and advise business units on safe expansion into new markets. 

8. Cost-effectiveness and scalable deployment

Because Sensa Agents are cloud-native SaaS solutions, they scale instantly without the infrastructure costs of on-premise software. This makes it cost-effective to expand capabilities, handle unpredictable transaction spikes, and support growth in new markets. 

The result is a higher return on investment and a more agile compliance function, which brings us to… 

9. Proactive risk management

AI Agents empower institutions to move from reactive to proactive compliance. By detecting emerging risks earlier in the transaction lifecycle, they allow for intervention before suspicious activity results in confirmed financial crime. 

This proactive stance reduces the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and operational disruption. 

10. Cross-domain collaboration for a unified view of risk

Most financial crime functions (AML, fraud, sanctions, and KYC/CDD) still operate in silos. This means valuable intelligence from one domain may never inform investigations in another. 

Sensa Agents can break down silos. Connecting to any internal or external data source via APIs and webhooks, they can share intelligence instantly across teams. 

For example, a Sensa Web Research Agent might find adverse media about a customer during a fraud investigation. That insight can be automatically passed to the AML team via the Summary Agent, enriching an investigation before it begins. This capability delivers a single, integrated view of risk across the company, which is something siloed legacy systems can’t achieve. 

How Sensa Agents work in practice 

The Sensa Summary Agent, Sensa Narrative Agent, and the Sensa Web Research Agent are just some of the pre-integrated AI Agents that come with Sensa Investigation. They are already demonstrating the power of agentic AI in AML: 

• Sensa Summary Agent: Consolidates internal data into concise case summaries, accelerating the triage and review process. 
• Sensa Narrative Agent: Drafts complete, professional SAR narratives aligned to institutional and regulatory standards. 
• Sensa Web Research Agent: Conducts thorough online and database research to identify external risk indicators, scoring sources for relevance. 

These agents can work individually or together, passing outputs between them to complete multi-step workflows automatically. For example, a flagged transaction could trigger the Summary Agent to prepare a case overview, the Web Research Agent to pull external intelligence, and the Narrative Agent to compile the SAR, all within a fraction of the time it would take a human investigator to complete. 

Built for control and governance 

While Sensa Agents automate complex tasks, they do so under strict governance as part of SymphonyAI’s and the customer’s responsible AI policy: 

• Customizable: Trained on an institution’s policies, processes, and risk appetite. 
• Human-in-the-loop: Investigators can approve, override, or refine agent outputs at any point, with complete control and oversight at any stage of an Agent task. 
• Fully auditable: Every action, decision, and source is recorded, justified in natural language, and traceable. 
• Continuous improvement: Agents learn from human feedback and operational outcomes. 

This design ensures that automation enhances human expertise, and that compliance leaders remain firmly in control of investigative processes. 

The future of AML with agentic AI 

Agentic AI, as embodied in Sensa Agents, offers a fundamentally different approach to the traditional slow, reactive, and manual AML model. They provide faster, more accurate investigations, continuous adaptation to new threats, and a scalable, cost-effective operating model. 

Institutions adopting this technology can expect: 

• Significant reductions in investigation time. 
• Lower false-positive rates and higher SAR quality. 
• Greater agility in responding to regulatory change. 
• Enhanced job satisfaction for investigators freed from repetitive work. 

With Sensa Risk Intelligence and its growing ecosystem of Sensa Agents, compliance is brought into the modern day.  

A complete, end-to-end system that delivers what financial institutions require to fight evolving difficulties and challenges, get in touch to find out more about SRI and to better understand how it can enhance your unique requirements. 

Related resources

This is the 5th dedicated article about SRI. The other articles are below.

Introducing Sensa Risk Intelligence – From reactive to proactive risk management (SRI #1)

AI-led compliance in financial services (SRI #2)

The 50/50 Compliance Model (SRI #3)

Why is the traditional compliance model broken? (SRI #4)

Why regulators love agentic AI (SRI #6)

The future of financial crime prevention (SRI #7)

Sensa Risk Intelligence