- Key insight: The appearance of new AI tools for banks won't obviate the need for experienced and well-trained bank employees.
- What's at stake: When AI is praised for its potential to save money by replacing people, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in staff.
- Forward look: The institutions that will thrive won't necessarily be the ones that adopt AI the fastest or most aggressively. They'll be the ones whose leaders focus first on their people.
After a couple of decades of speaking to banking groups, large and small, I've found that certain requested topics are evergreen. Almost without fail, when leaders share what they'd like addressed, some version of "dealing with change" is on the list.
Whether it was the proliferation of smartphones and
I often joke that the saying "The only thing constant in this world is change," wasn't merely a platitude, but a statement of fact.
That said, the rise of
For perspective, three years ago I asked a graduate school banking class I teach, made up of leaders within their organizations, if anyone had heard of ChatGPT. It was the only LLM I was familiar with at the time. Maybe 5% had.
The following year, I asked a new group if anyone was using it or other large language models. About 50% were. Last year, every person in the class was using some form of AI personally, and most had begun exploring and experimenting with it inside their organizations. (And some had but hadn't told anyone yet.)
What started as skepticism among bankers turned into interest, and then into both excitement and fear. There are few things more motivating to bank leaders than the fear of being left behind.
That fear is healthy, at least insofar as is reveals that leaders do not want to see their organizations at a competitive disadvantage because they were asleep at the wheel as a dominant new technology reshaped the industry.
Now, the jury is still out on how fast and how much that will happen, but it's at least a reasonable possibility. One clear risk is committing major capital and overhauling practices too soon or too blindly.
Being a "first mover" may not produce returns that justify the risk. Yet I've witnessed another, equally harmful challenge as our businesses evolve.
Even our most dedicated back-office support staff and customer-facing bankers have begun wondering about their futures. It's hard to read any article about AI that doesn't lead with its potential to save money by replacing people.
Let's be honest. Constantly hearing that something far smarter than you could easily replace you doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
I'm fond of pointing out to groups that the boldness and confidence of some of the highest-profile "bank tech" pundits are not correlated with their accuracy. These are the same folks now backtracking on their decade-long warnings about the obsolescence of bank branches. Yet they seem undeterred in issuing equally confident predictions about AI.
In order for artificial intelligence to be useful, it has to be powered by accurate information, three community-bank executives agreed at a virtual panel hosted by American Banker.
Maybe there's a tsunami of change coming soon. Maybe there isn't. But the trepidation is already here, and empathetic leaders know that part of their role is to keep people informed, prepared, and confident that whatever changes are made, they are being made for them, not simply to them.
One way I've found to cut through that trepidation is with a simple, battle-tested analogy I have used for a couple of years now: AI is a tool. In fact, it may be one of the most useful tools we've ever been given.
When skilled carpenters were given pneumatic nail guns a few decades ago, their productivity skyrocketed. These new tools saved time, not to mention a lot of smashed fingers and sore wrists. But if you weren't a skilled carpenter, giving you a nail gun didn't make you one. It just made you dangerous.
In presentations, I show a picture of myself holding a nail gun at a Habitat for Humanity project. They apparently thought I looked like I knew what I was doing.
After my first two minutes of confidently shooting nails into the wall, I spent the next ten minutes sheepishly removing about twenty nails I had fired that completely missed the support stud.
The nail gun didn't make me a skilled carpenter. It simply made my mistakes faster and more expensive. With all due respect, without good people steering it, AI can work the same way.
The good news is that the reverse is equally true. When AI is placed in the hands of skilled, well-trained people, it can be transformative. It will improve their productivity, insight, and value to both customers and our banks.
The institutions that will thrive won't necessarily be the ones that adopt AI the fastest or most aggressively. They'll be the ones whose leaders focus first on their people.
They'll openly communicate, invest in targeted training, and treat AI as a powerful multiplier of human potential, not primarily a replacement for it.
When leaders get that balance right, change stops being something to fear, and starts becoming something their people accept and even look forward to.
And there's nothing artificial about that.
