Written by practitioners, not commentators

Anuj Agarwal

Senior Director · Agentic AI and product

Anuj Agarwal is a Senior Director leading agentic AI and product for a major UK bank. He sets the vision and strategy for AI agents across banking operations and customer-facing commercial products, and works on one of the hardest problems in enterprise AI today: making AI agents work safely and at scale in a heavily regulated industry.

In that role he designed the bank’s framework for coordinating specialised agents across business domains, and established a responsible AI approach built on audit trails, confidence thresholds, explainability and human override, now used across several business areas. His team embedded agents at every step of commercial client onboarding, cutting the journey from weeks to days. He leads a cross-functional team of product, engineering, data and risk specialists, and owns the investment case, the outcomes and the controls.

What makes Anuj’s perspective unusual is range. Over twenty years he has been a technologist, a product leader and a founder. As an architect, he led innovation and technology design across trade, asset and supply chain finance, working in the UK and the United States. As a founder, he co-created a regulated fixed income trading platform in India and scaled it to five million customers in just over a year, working directly with regulators and policymakers to shape the retail bond market it served. As a product leader, he now answers for whether AI actually changes the numbers, not just whether it impresses in a demo.

That combination shapes how he thinks about agents. He looks at every one the way an engineer, a product owner and a P&L owner would at the same time: can it be built safely, is it solving the right problem, and is it worth what it costs? AI Agents That Work, co-written with Brendan Murtagh, is the method he and his teams use to answer those questions.

Anuj studied fintech and general management at the University of Oxford. He is a regular speaker at London Tech Week, the AI Summit and the Banking Summit, and mentors product and technology leaders moving into AI. He lives in London.

Brendan Murtagh

Senior Director · Banking product and transformation

Brendan Murtagh is a Senior Director in banking product and transformation, with over 20 years’ experience leading product development, customer experience and large-scale organisational change within financial services.

Throughout his career at NatWest Group, Brendan has worked at the intersection of product strategy, customer experience and enterprise transformation, helping shape how complex organisations design, deliver and improve their services. His experience spans multidisciplinary leadership, significant transformation investment and the practical challenges of delivering sustainable change within highly regulated environments.

His work increasingly involves the opportunities presented by AI, automation and data-driven decision-making, exploring how emerging capabilities can be embedded into products, customer journeys and operating models to deliver meaningful business outcomes.

As co-author of AI Agents That Work, Brendan brings the perspective of a business practitioner who understands that successful innovation requires more than technological capability. His contribution focuses on bridging the gap between what technology makes possible and what organisations can realistically implement, govern and scale, ensuring that AI adoption is grounded in customer needs, operational realities and measurable business value.