Build an AI-Ready Financial Services Firm with Publicis Sapient and AWS
For banks, wealth managers and insurers, AI value does not come from generic experimentation. It comes from solving the industry’s hardest operational and customer challenges at scale: modernizing legacy estates, improving advisor and employee productivity, accelerating document-heavy workflows, delivering more contextual and personalized experiences, and doing it all with security, governance and compliance built in.
Publicis Sapient and AWS help financial institutions move from isolated pilots to production-ready transformation. Combining AWS-native AI and cloud services with Publicis Sapient’s SPEED capabilities—Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI—we help firms build the foundation, prioritize the right use cases and scale AI in ways that create measurable business value.
Why financial services firms need an AI-ready foundation
Financial institutions are under pressure from every direction. Customers expect more relevant, seamless digital experiences. Advisors and employees need faster access to trusted information. Operations teams are burdened by complex workflows, fragmented data and high document volumes. At the same time, regulatory scrutiny, risk controls and security requirements leave little room for error.
That is why becoming AI-ready is not just about model access. It requires modern data and cloud architecture, responsible AI governance, stronger observability, and an operating model that connects technology choices to business outcomes. Publicis Sapient brings deep financial services experience together with AWS cloud and AI services to help firms modernize with confidence.
A staged path to financial-services AI at scale
1. Readiness: identify value, assess risk and prepare the estate
The journey starts with clarity. Publicis Sapient’s AWS Gen AI Fast Track helps business and technology leaders align on where AI can create value in financial services and what is needed to deploy it responsibly. Through workshops, readiness assessments and use case prioritization, we help firms evaluate data accessibility, usability, governance requirements and organizational readiness.
This phase is designed to produce practical outputs, not abstract strategy. Institutions leave with an AI readiness report, an action plan, prioritized use cases, defined ROI and success criteria, and a roadmap for moving from prototype to minimum viable product and beyond.
For financial services firms, this stage is critical for identifying the highest-value use cases, such as advisor enablement, intelligent document workflows, contextual enterprise search, customer service augmentation and legacy modernization.
2. Modernization: create the foundation for secure, scalable AI
Many financial institutions know where they want to go with AI but are held back by legacy technology, fragmented data and slow delivery cycles. Publicis Sapient helps organizations modernize the underlying estate so AI can be deployed on a scalable, compliant foundation.
With AWS, we help firms build on secure, flexible cloud infrastructure and use services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon OpenSearch Service, IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Macie and Security Hub to support development, monitoring, security and governance across the AI lifecycle.
Publicis Sapient’s proprietary platforms accelerate this work. Sapient Slingshot helps modernize legacy systems by turning existing code into verified specifications and generating modern software with full traceability. In application modernization work, Publicis Sapient has seen more than 50% reduction in modernization costs, 50% fewer defects and a 50% increase in migration speed across over 100 end-to-end experiments. In one benefits-provider engagement, AI-enabled modernization delivered 3x faster migration, improved traceability and made code easier to maintain in a modern stack.
For financial services organizations managing long-lived core systems, this modernization stage is what turns AI ambition into operational reality.
3. Governed deployment: put AI into real workflows with compliance in mind
Once the foundation is in place, the priority becomes deploying AI where it can safely improve how work gets done.
For wealth managers and private banks, contextual search is a powerful example. Publicis Sapient helped a leading wealth management firm migrate its contextual search platform to AWS, reducing response times by 80% and achieving a 90%+ user satisfaction rating. For advisors, that means faster access to relevant knowledge, less time hunting for answers and more time focused on clients.
For banks and insurers, governed deployment can also target document-heavy workflows. AI can support the extraction, summarization and routing of information across high-volume operational processes, helping teams reduce manual effort and improve consistency. Combined with retrieval-augmented generation and search capabilities, firms can surface the right information to employees and customers in context while maintaining the control, auditability and oversight required in regulated environments.
This is where Bodhi adds value. Built as an enterprise-grade AI platform on AWS, Bodhi supports workflows across search, analytics, forecasting, personalization, compliance and decision support. It is designed for speed, scale and security, helping financial institutions operationalize AI in ways that are useful to frontline employees and safe for the enterprise.
4. Scale: expand from priority use cases to enterprise transformation
Financial services firms rarely stop at one use case. Once value is proven, the challenge becomes scaling across products, business units and journeys without losing control.
Publicis Sapient helps organizations build the roadmap, operating model and technical architecture to scale AI responsibly. Because different use cases may require different models, tools and controls, we work with firms to create a portfolio-based approach rather than forcing every problem into a single pattern.
At scale, financial institutions can use AI to:
- Improve advisor and employee productivity with faster knowledge access and workflow assistance
- Enable contextual search across research, policies, product content and operational knowledge
- Automate document-heavy processes in servicing, onboarding, claims and case management
- Personalize digital experiences, content and recommendations using trusted customer and behavioral data
- Accelerate software delivery and reduce technical debt through AI-assisted modernization
Throughout this journey, Publicis Sapient’s SPEED framework ensures initiatives stay aligned to measurable business outcomes. Strategy keeps efforts focused on value. Product and Experience make solutions useful and adoptable. Engineering and Data & AI make them secure, integrated and ready for production.
Why Publicis Sapient and AWS for financial services
Publicis Sapient brings together industry expertise, cloud engineering and AI implementation experience to help financial services firms modernize with confidence. Our AWS relationship is backed by deep credentials, including AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status, AWS Generative AI Competency and Financial Services Consulting specialization. Across our AWS practice, we bring thousands of accreditations and certifications and a strong record of delivering modernization, data and AI solutions at enterprise scale.
Most importantly, our approach is outcome-driven. We do not position AI as a standalone experiment. We help financial institutions use AWS-native services and Publicis Sapient accelerators to solve the business problems that matter most: speed to insight, operational efficiency, modernization, personalization and governed scale.
From AI readiness to legacy modernization, from advisor enablement to compliant deployment, Publicis Sapient and AWS help financial services firms build the capabilities required for the next era of digital business transformation.
Ready to build an AI-ready firm?
Whether you are modernizing a legacy estate, improving advisor productivity, automating document-heavy operations or creating more personalized customer experiences, Publicis Sapient and AWS can help you move from ambition to enterprise value—securely, responsibly and at speed.