AI Agents in Financial Markets: Architecture, Applications, and Systemic Implications

Abstract: Recent advances in LLMs, tool-using agents, and financial machine learning are shifting financial automation from isolated prediction tasks to integrated decision systems that can perceive information, reason over objectives, and generate or execute actions. This paper develops an integrative framework for analysing agentic finance: financial market environments in which autonomous or semi-autonomous AI systems participate in information processing, decision support, monitoring, and execution workflows. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, the paper proposes a four-layer architecture of financial AI agents covering data perception, reasoning engines, strategy generation, and execution with control. Second, it introduces the Agentic Financial Market Model (AFMM), a stylised agent-based representation linking agent design parameters such as autonomy depth, heterogeneity, execution coupling, infrastructure concentration, and supervisory observability to market-level outcomes including efficiency, liquidity resilience, volatility, and systemic risk. Third, it develops an illustrative empirical application based on event studies of AI-agent capability disclosures and heterogeneous market repricing. The central argument is that the systemic implications of AI in finance depend less on model intelligence alone than on how agent architectures are distributed, coupled, and governed across institutions. In the near term, the most plausible equilibrium is bounded autonomy, in which AI agents operate as supervised co-pilots, monitoring systems, and constrained execution modules embedded within human decision processes.