SEI Taps IBM for Agentic AI Overhaul
Financial services firm SEI is partnering with IBM to accelerate its adoption of agentic AI and automation. The collaboration is aimed at modernizing SEI's enterprise operations to boost efficiency and scalability. It's a significant sign that large corporations are moving beyond basic AI tools to implement more sophisticated, autonomous agent-based systems.
This partnership builds on SEI's recent internal AI development. In 2023, the firm established an AI Center of Excellence and in October 2024, it launched SEIGPT, a proprietary generative AI framework. Internally, SEIGPT applications are already being used by around 400 employees and have helped respond to over 7,000 client service inquiries and analyze thousands of legal contracts. The push for automation is central to SEI's business model, which manages, advises, or administers approximately $1.9 trillion in assets as of late 2025. A large portion of the company's revenue is derived from technology and operations outsourcing, built around its core SEI Wealth Platform. This makes scaling operations and improving efficiency a critical driver for growth. The collaboration will focus on "agentic AI," which moves beyond reactive tools like chatbots. These AI agents can autonomously plan and execute complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human input. In finance, this includes use cases like continuous compliance monitoring, fraud detection, and automating back-office workflows such as reconciliations and reporting. IBM Consulting will use its Enterprise Advantage platform to assess SEI's systems and data, identifying areas for modernization. A key piece of IBM's technology is watsonx Orchestrate, a platform designed to build, manage, and govern these AI agents, ensuring their actions are traceable and compliant—a crucial requirement for financial services. The move reflects a major industry trend. According to an IDC report, 78% of banks are actively exploring agentic AI to enhance customer experience (39%) and boost operational efficiency (36%). Gartner also predicts that a third of all enterprise applications will be agentic within the next three years. According to SEI's Chief Operating Officer, Sean Denham, the goal is to enable employees to "spend less time on manual, repetitive work and more time on higher-value, relationship-driven activities." This is part of a strategy to innovate the company's operational backbone as it enters its next phase of growth.
