Intelligent Automation and Sustainable Performance of Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria: A Critical Review of the Roles of Operational Efficiency, Employee Adaptability and Organizational Agility

Intelligent automation is revolutionizing banking from digitization of consumer transactions to integration of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, analytics, and connected workflows. Deposit money banks in Nigeria are making efforts in this regard to cut down costs, improve service quality, manage fraud, and cope up with competition from digitally minded financial service companies. But acquisition of technologies does not mean sustainable performance. This paper aims to critically assess how intelligent automation may affect the sustainable performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria in terms of finance, operations, people, and institutions. In this regard, this paper takes the form of a narrative and conceptual review where the focus is primarily on Nigerian literature but using international literature to draw theory and context comparison. The review finds out that there are three major interrelated explanatory mechanisms such as operational efficiency, adaptive capacity of employees, and organizational agility. With automation, banks can achieve faster, accurate, scalable, compliant, and supported decisions. On the other hand, these benefits can be hampered by incompatibility with legacy systems, lack of data, security risks, high cost of implementation, resistance from employees, skill mismatches, and poor governance. Using socio-technical systems theory, task-technology fit theory, resource-based view, dynamic capability theory, and human capital theory, this article presents a conceptual understanding of intelligent automation in the context of socio-technical organizational capabilities rather than being just a technology. This study pinpoints some conceptual ambiguity, short-sightedness about performance, weak indicators of automation maturity, and lack of longitudinal studies in Nigerian banking literature.