During Sibos 2026, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Sam Cauvain-Welsh, Head of Core Product for Global Custody at J.P. Morgan; Alexandre Kech, CEO at the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF); and Daljit Sokhi, Managing Director at Global Custodian, for a conversation about the future of agentic AI in custody and asset servicing.
Over the past several years, AI has become an increasingly prominent topic at Sibos.
Last year, Chainlink and 24 of the world’s largest financial services institutions announced the successful second phase of an industry initiative to standardize corporate actions processing using oracles and AI.
The production-grade deployment, which uses the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) to validate AI model outputs and transform them into ISO 20022-compliant messages, establishes a model for saving the global financial industry tens of billions of dollars in annual corporate actions processing costs with minimal disruption to existing systems.
Nazarov believes verifying unstructured data is currently one of the most compelling use cases for AI. Compared to revalidating custodian and exchange data manually, he said, “AI can do it better and that can create a lot of real efficiency.”
Chainlink’s forward-looking focus is how AI agents can access and interact with tokenized assets such as cash, equities, and funds.
“There are still some open questions there, because you can’t exactly just let the AI do whatever it wants, and there are also AML/KYC considerations,” Nazarov explained.
“But there are so many people who believe there will be agentic finance and what that really means is that the AI is now directing their transactions. We’re building a lot of infrastructure that makes that very easy and we actually seek to be the preferred way for AIs to do that.”
In a recent paper, GLEIF proposes using the vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier), an advanced version of the globally recognized LEI (Legal Entity Identifier), to provide real-time verification of AI agents and the organizations behind them. The vLEI integrates with Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) and Cross-Chain Identity (CCID) framework to enable portable, verifiable credentials that can be used across different blockchains.
“You definitely need some kind of public set of instructions about AI that is verifiable,” said Nazarov.
“The vLEI does a really good job at that. I think that’s a very solid solution.”
Over the next year, he anticipates a growing number of decisions will be delegated to agents. In the more distant future, assuming AI reaches general purpose intelligence, he envisions a world where “probably everybody will have some kind of AI representative.”
“Then the decision-making power of those agents will be high.”