PromethistAI Takes Its Relational Agents to US Banks and Insurers
Answering for CustomerRelations.io
PROFILE PICTURE OF PROMETHIST.AI CEO
Promethist.AI logo
Much of AI in banking is built to make tasks faster. Relational Agents are built for the decisions that need more than an answer.
The right answer isn’t always the right help. Sometimes people need another question, a challenge to their assumptions, or a human adviser. Relational Intelligence is about recognizing that difference”
— KLARA LORENCOVA
NEW YORK CITY, NY, UNITED STATES, November 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- PromethistAI today announced that it is bringing Relational Agents, AI agents built to help people make important decisions, to banks and insurers in the US. The company builds them for both sides of the relationship: the bankers and advisers who serve clients, and the clients themselves. Co-founder and CEO Klara Lorencova leads the company from New York.
For years, banks have been trying to move beyond product-focused selling toward more advisory and consultative relationships with their clients. It is one of the industry’s own long-standing strategic goals, and one that has consistently proven difficult to achieve in practice and at scale.
Lorencova’s case starts with a warning. “Banks know where they want to go. The risk is that AI takes them in the opposite direction,” she said. “If we use it to train bankers primarily to pitch products more effectively, then build customer-facing agents optimized to do the same, we could make the old sales model more efficient than ever, while moving further away from the relationships we actually want to build.”
People can now find almost any financial information they need, often in seconds. Yet important decisions still stall. Only 40% of Americans are extremely or very confident in their ability to make and execute financial decisions, according to Corebridge Financial’s 2026 Financial Capability Survey. Information has become a commodity. Knowing what to do with it has not.
Lorencova points to two gaps that help explain why.
The decision gap. Knowing your options is not the same as knowing which one is right for you. To choose well, people need to understand what matters to them and what each option would mean for their life. Often they only work this out while deciding. Without that understanding, more information does not help. People delay, pick the default, or choose nothing.
The trust gap. Many important decisions rest on advice people cannot fully check, even afterward. Whether a mortgage or a pension was the right choice is often not clear for years. So people judge the advice by judging the adviser: Does this person understand my situation? Are they acting in my interest? Until the answer is yes, people hold back.
The two gaps are linked. If people doubt whose interest the advice serves, they cannot use it to decide. And people can only see that they have been understood through the help they receive. So closing one gap without the other is not enough.
Closing both gaps has long been the work of good advisers and the best relationship bankers. As AI makes product information and routine answers available to everyone, Lorencova expects those skills to matter in many more customer conversations, at banks, insurers and any company that keeps a direct relationship with its customers. Most customer-facing teams, she argues, were never trained for that work.
PromethistAI offers its Relational Agents in two products, one for each side of the conversation. Empower prepares bankers and advisers for the conversations that matter through AI coaching, roleplay and ongoing performance support, and is designed to reward understanding the client, not only closing the sale. Engage works directly with customers, helping them clarify their needs, understand their options and reach a human adviser when they need one.
Relational Agents are designed to close both gaps in the same conversation. The difference, Lorencova says, is not that they ask questions, but that they judge when a question helps. A customer who asks for today’s mortgage rate and only needs the rate should get it, quickly. One who isn’t sure what they can afford needs something else: questions about their income, plans and other commitments, a clear view of what each option would mean for them, and a next step that fits, even if that step is not to borrow yet. Engage is designed to tell the two apart. PromethistAI calls the capability behind this Relational Intelligence.
“The right answer isn’t always the right help,” Lorencova said. “Sometimes people need another question, a challenge to their assumptions, or a human adviser. Relational Intelligence is about recognizing that difference.”
PromethistAI’s roots are in conversational AI. The company was founded by AI engineers and researchers in the field, among them Amazon Alexa Prize finalists and Jan Sedivy, an expert in speech recognition and conversational AI with 20 years of experience at IBM, Watson and Google, and 19 US patents.
Closing the trust gap carries its own risk. A conversation can make someone feel understood without the advice being any good, and a persuasive agent could steer people just as convincingly in the wrong direction. So trust has to rest on what constrains the agent, not on how the conversation feels. Each institution decides what the agent may explain and which recommendations are off limits. When a question goes beyond those limits or calls for a licensed adviser, the agent is designed to say so and bring in a person. PromethistAI builds the technology; the institution and its qualified people remain accountable for the advice.
Lorencova judges success by what happens next: decisions people understand and stand behind, and trust they give because it was earned. She sees no conflict between that and growth.
“Better advice isn’t the opposite of better sales. It may be the foundation of the next generation of banking growth,” she said.
Lorencova sees this as part of a wider shift. Brands that want to stay relevant in an AI-first world, she argues, will need to become a continuous and meaningful part of their customers’ progress. To be chosen, they will have to go beyond selling products and help people navigate change, adapt to a rapidly evolving world, make better decisions and achieve what matters to them. Banks are no exception.
“Buying a home is a major financial decision. But the life someone hopes to build around it unfolds over years, through changing plans, new opportunities, and unexpected challenges,” she said. “In the AI era, banks have an opportunity to make people feel seen, understood, and supported throughout that journey, not just when a financial product is needed. That’s how a bank can become part of what people achieve and who they become.”
About Klara Lorencova
Klara Lorencova is co-founder and CEO of PromethistAI and leads the company from New York. Her work focuses on customer relationships, human capability and how businesses can create lasting value with AI. Before co-founding PromethistAI, she spent more than 20 years in business and at leading law firms, advising companies and entrepreneurs on strategy and business development. She holds a degree in law.
About PromethistAI
PromethistAI builds Relational Agents that help enterprises move beyond product-focused selling and transactional interactions toward more advisory and consultative approaches to sales and customer relationships. PromethistAI Empower develops these capabilities in customer-facing employees through AI coaching, AI-powered roleplay, and ongoing performance support. PromethistAI Engage brings the same principles directly into AI-led customer conversations, within each enterprise’s authorized scope. In both applications, agents can be embodied as Digital Humans. PromethistAI began its commercial journey in banking and is now expanding across industries, including insurance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and FMCG/CPG. PromethistAI’s vision is a world where people increasingly shape who they become, and choose the businesses that make them feel seen, understood, and supported on the way. PromethistAI is a Representative Vendor in the Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Humans.* Learn more at promethist.ai.
Source: Corebridge Financial 2026 Financial Capability Survey, conducted by Morning Consult among 2,213 US adults, February 3-5, 2026.
* Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Humans, [analyst names], October 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Klara Lorencova
Promethist.ai
media@promethist.ai
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
YouTube
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
