Overview
- U.S. bank leaders said AI is lifting output, with JPMorgan citing productivity rising from 3% to 6% and forecasting 40%–50% gains for operations staff, while Wells Fargo and PNC pointed to higher throughput without immediate headcount cuts.
- A Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 151 senior finance executives found two-thirds expect headcount to rise early in adoption and more than 70% see operating costs increasing over the next three years, with analysts projecting cost ratios could normalize by 2027–2028 as automation scales.
- Google launched a public preview of fully managed Model Context Protocol servers that let AI agents tap Google Maps, BigQuery, Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine, with enterprise access free for paying customers and general availability targeted for early next year.
- The Linux Foundation formed the Agentic AI Foundation to steward open agent standards, with Anthropic donating MCP, Block contributing the Goose framework and OpenAI providing AGENTS.md, and members including AWS, Bloomberg, Cloudflare and Google.
- Attorneys general from 42 U.S. states and territories demanded stronger safety and child protections from 13 AI firms with a January 16, 2026 response date, as OpenAI separately warned its next-generation models could pose "high" cybersecurity risk and outlined access controls, monitoring and a new Frontier Risk Council.