During a fourth-quarter earnings call, held Friday (Jan. 16), PNC Financial Services Group Chairman and CEO Bill Demchak said that between 2022 and 2025, the bank gained 30 points of operating leverage through automation in its retail operations and care center operations.
“When we look at AI between ‘25 and ‘30, we see another 40 points of operating leverage,” Demchak said. “We have 171 different opportunities outlined and $1.4 billion of total addressable spend that we’re able to go after through. I mean, we use the term ‘AI,’ but I just think of it as the same march that we’ve been along with automation that has given us all those efficiencies between ‘22 and ‘25.”
These efficiencies include headcount savings from using agentic AI for coding, and contract savings in tech as PNC shut down older and redundant systems and replaced them with newer ones, Demchak said.
In 2026, PNC plans to boost its tech spending by 10%, and, within that category, increase its AI spending by 20%, Demchak said.
The bank is also continuing its building of branches to put itself in front of more clients, rebuilding its payments capabilities to make them more resilient and faster to change, and modernizing its data centers so PNC is “always on,” Demchak said.
“The ability to do that and still control expenses kind of comes on the back of this continuous improvement program, which we’re going to execute again in ‘26, and a lot of the savings in ‘26 coming out of our automation efforts, some of which are related to AI, but some of which are just straight-up automation to allow us to continue the investment profile we’ve had for years,” Demchak said.
Later during the call, Demchak said that for the areas in which PNC competes, its tech spend is at least on par and is aimed at optimizing the businesses in which it operates.
“And I think our product set is more than competitive, and I think our core infrastructure as it relates to running with everything being cloud native and built off of microservices and the ability to build products, is as good as anybody,” Demchak said.