At the 22nd China International Finance Forum held in Shanghai on December 19-20, CITIC SEC's Chief Information Officer and Head of Information Technology Center, Yu Xinli, delivered a keynote speech titled "CITIC SEC's AI Digital Employees." During the event, the company introduced its self-developed "Five-Tier AI Digital Employee Capability Standards," providing a clear framework for evaluating and advancing AI applications in the financial sector, thereby promoting standardized and systematic human-machine collaboration.
Yu Xinli emphasized that the current wave of technological revolution, led by artificial intelligence, is rapidly reshaping the financial industry. Facing widespread talent shortages, the sector urgently needs to transition from labor-intensive operations to intelligence-driven services. In response, CITIC SEC is actively exploring three evolutionary stages for digital employees: from "executors" to "thinkers," from "single-sensory" to "multi-sensory," and from "system tools" to "work partners." In the future, human employees will act as team leaders, directing digital employees to complete tasks, unlocking human potential, and fostering new productive forces.
"Our goal is to build an intelligent, anthropomorphic, and highly collaborative digital employee system, equipping each staff member with multiple 'digital counterparts.' Ultimately, we aim to achieve a new paradigm of 'one digital employee per position, one digital team per person' to empower digital operations and management," Yu stated. Currently, CITIC SEC has identified over 120 roles suitable for digital employee implementation, progressively deploying them across operations. Digital employees can encapsulate the expertise of seasoned professionals, elevating average service quality. Meanwhile, new hires can directly select digital employees as team members, learning through practice and integrating business operations with training to accelerate talent development.
To address industry-wide challenges such as vague definitions of "intelligence" and mismatched expectations, CITIC SEC innovatively adapted the globally recognized L1-L5 autonomous driving classification to create a universal AI digital employee capability assessment framework. This standard analogizes "drivers" to "human employees," "road environments" to "work scenarios," and "driving tasks" to "job tasks," precisely measuring digital employees' autonomy, decision-making, and accountability. The tiered system progresses from L1 (basic automation for repetitive tasks requiring full human oversight) to L5 (full autonomy with human-level decision-making and risk control, handling all responsibilities except rare edge cases).
The framework not only establishes clear communication standards for digital employee-related business, technology, and management but also guides incremental AI R&D, talent cultivation, and application planning. It enables scientific measurement of AI project value and risk, driving effective intelligent strategy implementation. CITIC SEC's deployed digital employee system, aligned with this standard, already covers smart investment research, investment banking, and wealth management. Teams like "Super Researchers," "Super Investment Bankers," and "Market Value Management Assistants" have demonstrated significant value in core business scenarios.
By 2025, CITIC SEC has launched 24 digital employees, generating direct economic benefits across business lines. In Q4 alone, these digital employees processed approximately 70 million requests, utilizing over 200 billion Tokens, with daily Token usage exceeding 2 billion—showing rapid growth. The underlying technology has earned 12 national patents and six software copyrights, while contributing to two standards by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
"The evolution of digital employees represents an efficiency revolution in human-machine collaboration for finance," Yu concluded. As digital employee systems mature, they will not only alleviate industry talent shortages but also dramatically boost per-capita productivity, reshaping the financial ecosystem. CITIC SEC aims to share its实践经验 (practical experience) to help build a standardized human-machine collaboration framework, collectively advancing toward a smarter financial future.
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