India’s financial inclusion story has made remarkable strides, but the last mile remains its toughest challenge. While technology has enabled millions to open bank accounts, real inclusion depends on whether people can access and use financial services when they need them. Here, agents-often the only human touchpoint in remote or underserved areas-play a crucial role. But these agents face deep-rooted barriers: lack of training, poor digital infrastructure, unclear policies, and limited support. As artificial intelligence scales across banking systems, the challenge is no longer how fast we can innovate, but whether we can design systems that empower agents to serve customers better. Inclusion will not come from technology alone. It must come from technology that understands and supports human needs-both agent and customer.
Over the past decade, India has constructed one of the world’s most expansive digital finance systems (World Bank Global Findex, 2021). With over 500 million Jan Dhan accounts (Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2023), Aadhaar covering nearly 95 per cent of the population (UIDAI, 2024), and digital transactions comprising over 95 per cent of all banking activities (PIB, 2024), the infrastructural reach is unprecedented. Yet inclusion cannot be measured by reach alone. More than a third of these accounts remain dormant (Global Findex, 2021), and in rural India, fewer than 40 per cent of adults use their accounts for digital payments (Global Findex, 2021). This persistent gap marks a shift in challenge: from infrastructure to engagement.
At the heart of India’s inclusion efforts are assisted banking agents-business correspondents, postal workers, and community intermediaries-who act as the critical bridge between formal financial systems and underserved communities. Their role goes beyond transactions; they help customers navigate digital tools, understand services, and build trust. Yet, they face daily operational hurdles: juggling multiple apps, poorly integrated applications, navigating inconsistent user interfaces, and managing customer anxieties amid technical glitches. Studies by CGAP, including the Financial Services Apps in India (2017) and the 2014 national agent survey, underscored these challenges-especially high cognitive load and lack of localised language support.
While visiting rural Karnataka, I saw an agent struggle with a crashing app. Instead of calling the official helpline, he turned to his WhatsApp group. Within minutes, peers from nearby districts sent voice notes, screenshots, and regulatory tips — a reminder that when systems fall short, human networks step up. It echoed what I witnessed firsthand working with banking teams across Southeast Asia. I have seen agents hesitate to promote digital services-not because they doubt their value, but because they fear the fallout when systems fail them. Trust isn’t built by technology alone. It’s built when systems empower those on the frontlines to deliver confidently. In my experience, confidence, not access, is the true currency of digital adoption.
This hesitation is part of what I call the inclusion latency curve-the time lag between first access and confident engagement. It’s a curve shaped less by technology gaps and more by trust deficits. I have watched agents explain the same service repeatedly, only to see customers remain unsure-not because the product was flawed, but because the experience around it didn’t feel reliable. We have long treated inclusion as a distribution problem. Could we be wrong? It’s a design-for-trust problem. And no matter how advanced the technology is, if it doesn’t empower the people at its center, the gap will remain.
The answer lies in embedding intelligence directly into the agent’s workflow-not to replace the human touch, but to enhance it. Agent assistive systems powered by Agentic AI offer precisely this bridge. Unlike traditional automation aimed at removing humans from the loop, Agentic AI acts as a cognitive partner, augmenting human judgment with timely, context-aware support. These systems assist agents at critical moments: surfacing real-time prompts, translating financial jargon, simplifying regulatory language, and even flagging signs of customer hesitation. They help transform friction into clarity and hesitation into trust.
This isn’t a future vision — it’s already unfolding. I have seen AI-powered agent-assist systems in global service sectors achieve a tremendous drop-in handling time and exponential increase in agent confidence. Importantly, these tools didn’t sideline the workforce but elevated them. In India, AI-powered voice assistants are being piloted to support microfinance agents during onboarding in regional languages. Early reports suggest improvements in comprehension and reductions in dropout rates, especially in dialect-rich areas. Even modest AI interventions, such as on-screen nudges or multilingual support prompts, have shown in pilot engagements to reduce transaction errors and agent hesitancy. These aren’t headline-grabbing breakthroughs but quiet enablers that build trust incrementally at the frontline.
But realising this potential depends on more than isolated pilots. We must create the right enabling environment: an inclusion-first AI sandbox-one designed to test AI systems against three critical pillars: comprehension, explainability, and auditability (World Economic Forum, 2025). Comprehension asks whether agents and customers can easily understand AI outputs in their own language and context. Explainability ensures AI-generated decisions can be conveyed in clear, culturally relevant terms. Auditability guarantees every AI-assisted interaction can be traced, reviewed, and justified by institutions and regulators alike. We need regulators, industry bodies, and technology providers to co-create this sandbox, not as a compliance exercise, but as a shared mission. If we fail to govern AI with inclusion at its heart, we risk creating systems that perform perfectly yet erode trust invisibly. Our measures of success must shift from transaction speed to clarity, confidence, and completion.
Over three decades of leading digital transformation in global markets, I have learned this: inclusion is not a technology project. It’s a trust project. And trust isn’t built by access alone, it’s built through predictable, human-centered interactions at moments of doubt. The next decade of financial inclusion will not be just won by scale or speed. It will be won by how deeply we connect with both agents and customers, and how intentionally we govern the systems that serve them.
We need systems that don’t just complete transactions but anticipate the trust moments that define them. Inclusion won’t fail for lack of technology. It will fail for lack of trust moments. Because inclusion isn’t a finish line. It’s a relationship we build, one trusted interaction at a time.
Let’s build systems that don’t just reach the last mile — but resonate with it.
(The writer is Global Digital Banking & Finance Industry Technologist, Co-Founder & CEO at i-exceed Technologies)