This year's earnings season has seen artificial intelligence become a prominent keyword in nearly every bank's annual report. From major state-owned banks to joint-stock commercial banks, AI is no longer merely a supplementary technological feature but has taken center stage as a primary indicator of core competitiveness. In this profound technological transformation and business race centered around "digital intelligence," banks are not only investing hundreds of billions in real capital but are also deeply embedding AI into every operational aspect, including credit approval, risk prevention, and customer service.

Strategic Positioning: AI Transitions from Optional to Essential A notable change in the 2025 bank annual reports is the strategic language upgrade, with "digitalization" being replaced by "digital intelligence." Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has fully upgraded its "Digital ICBC" strategy to "AI-ICBC," proposing to create an AI-native financial productivity paradigm and build a comprehensive AI system integrating technology infrastructure, knowledge engineering, intelligent agent collaboration, business empowerment, and ecosystem evolution. China Construction Bank formulated the "AI+ Implementation Plan," establishing a development framework focused on technological foundation, scenario empowerment, and value conversion. Agricultural Bank of China made organizational adjustments by establishing a dedicated "Smart Bank Construction Office" to permeate AI capabilities throughout all business operations through coordinated advancement. Bank of China is comprehensively implementing its "AI+" initiative, developing the BOCAI large model capability platform with access to over ten mainstream large models. Postal Savings Bank of China launched its "AI2ALL" digital ecosystem strategy, targeting comprehensive external reach and internal efficiency improvement to integrate AI capabilities across management and customer service chains. Bank of Communications released its "AI+ Action Plan (2025-2027)," clearly stating the transition of financial technology from a "support tool" to "core productivity and innovation engine."

Among joint-stock banks, similar emphasis has been placed on elevating AI to strategic importance. China Merchants Bank established its "AI First" core strategy with development principles of "priority, leadership, and initiative," aiming to become the industry's first intelligent bank. Ping An Bank is accelerating "AI+Finance" implementation, focusing on digital employees, precision marketing, and risk control, with large model application scenarios surging from over 200 to more than 390 within a year. China CITIC Bank is deeply implementing its "Three-Year AI+ Action Plan (2025-2027)," adopting an "AI empowers everything" approach to create a collaborative "large model + small model" framework. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank initiated its "AI Implementation Action Plan (2026)," emphasizing the reconstruction of entire financial service processes with AI-native thinking. These strategic deployments demonstrate that AI's role has evolved from isolated technological projects to institution-wide priority initiatives, representing not just terminology changes but fundamental logic restructuring where banks aim to enable machines to think and decide like human experts rather than merely moving offline operations online.

Massive Investments: Heavy Spending on Computing Power and Talent Grand strategic blueprints require substantial financial backing. In 2025, the banking industry's investment in financial technology can be described as lavish. Data shows that the six major state-owned banks collectively invested over 130 billion yuan in financial technology. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China led with 28.588 billion yuan in investments, while China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and Bank of China maintained high investment levels exceeding 25 billion yuan each. Notably, Bank of Communications' investment reached 5.78% of its operating revenue, a particularly prominent ratio among major state-owned banks demonstrating its determination for technology-driven transformation. These substantial funds primarily flow into two dimensions: computing infrastructure and high-end talent acquisition.

Bank of Communications Vice President Qian Bin revealed during the earnings conference that a significant portion of the bank's 12.342 billion yuan technology investment in 2025 went to AI fields, with intelligent computing scale growing over 50% compared to the previous year. China Construction Bank achieved 145.69 PFLOPs of intelligent computing power in 2025, representing a 24.52% increase from the end of 2024. Vice President Lei Ming illustrated this as equivalent to 1.46 quadrillion operations per second, sufficient to support training and inference for large-scale models. China Merchants Bank's intelligent computing infrastructure demonstrated daily token throughput growth of 10.1 times compared to 2024, providing robust power for large-scale model training. Talent competition has been equally intense across institutions. By the end of 2025, China Construction Bank employed over 30,000 digital finance professionals, China Merchants Bank maintained over 10,000 R&D personnel, Bank of Communications reached 9.99% technology staff ratio, and Postal Savings Bank of China employed 7,414 technology professionals. These professionals with dual expertise in finance and AI technology are becoming the backbone of banking transformation.

Demonstrated Effectiveness: Entering the Deep Waters of Quality and Efficiency Improvement Are the massive investments worthwhile? The answer is affirmative. In 2025, AI application effectiveness entered the "deep waters" of quality and efficiency improvement, progressively advancing toward risk control and value creation stages. This manifests primarily in four dimensions: Significant operational efficiency improvements have been achieved through AI "digital employees" taking over repetitive tasks. Ping An Bank utilized generative AI for marketing content creation, saving approximately 60 million yuan in costs during 2025 alone. China CITIC Bank achieved over 200% efficiency improvement in corporate account opening through AI-driven centralized processing. Credit approval has undergone "minute-level" transformation, where China Construction Bank's "AI Application in Entire Credit Approval Process" reduced processing time to minutes, with AI-assisted review report writing reaching 80% proportion. Despite a 17% year-on-year increase in manual approval business volume in the first half of 2025, total approval time decreased by 24%. Risk control capabilities have achieved qualitative leaps, with CITIC Baixin Bank's intelligent risk control system automating risk feature discovery with 100% efficiency improvement, enabling system "autonomous evolution." China Merchants Bank's AI-assisted post-loan risk warning time advanced by an average of 42 days compared to traditional manual methods, achieving true preventive control. Inclusive finance has seen deepened expansion, where Agricultural Bank of China's "ABC e-Loan" balance exceeded 6.8 trillion yuan, growing nearly 20% from the previous year-end, by leveraging AI capabilities to profile small enterprises using alternative data like tax, invoice, and supply chain information. Internationally, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stated plainly in a Bloomberg Television interview: "We've demonstrated that spending $2 billion in costs can generate approximately $2 billion in benefits."

The banking sector's bet on AI represents not temporary technological euphoria but an inevitable choice facing industry transformation. The shift from "digital" to "digital intelligence" signifies the fundamental transition from process optimization to productivity reshaping. The 2025 annual reports mark just the beginning, as deeper integration between AI technology and financial scenarios may transform future banks from physical branch locations into always-online, ubiquitous intelligent financial stewards.