Why Banks Need to Stop Waiting on AI

So the best way to do AI is to really just jump into it. Let the people who are working on the day-to-day bring ideas to you.

All right. So bankers need to be like Nike and just do it. It’s time to get going on AI. How do they need to be thinking about this? Should they be iterating through it? What are the steps?

They should be iterating through it. They’re never going to be perfectly ready. Their data is never going to be perfectly clean. They’re never going to have all their policies perfectly in place because policies are constantly changing too.

So the best way to do AI is to really just jump into it. Find out what your biggest headaches are across the organization, and don’t just rely on the executive and management teams to bring use cases. Crowdsource it. Let the people who are working on the day-to-day bring ideas to you. Where are their biggest pain points? That’s where you can find the biggest points of efficiency.

Prototype your way through that. You’re not going to solve it on the first iteration.

No. And you have to be okay with failure. You have to understand that something might not be perfect or might not work. You have to be prepared to iterate and try again because that is the world we are stepping into with AI.

Things are moving so quickly that, by the time you’re ready for anything, you’re ready for something that’s now a legacy product.

One of the biggest advantages banks have is being very thoughtful, deliberate and risk-averse. This is not one of those situations where that’s serving them well.

No, but that’s one of the struggles. We are in a regulated industry. We have to be a little risk-averse, but you can’t let that stifle innovation.

You can manage that innovation internally before deploying it more broadly, make sure you’ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s, and still drive efficiencies.

Absolutely. You also have to make sure you have the right people in the right seats. You want really creative, innovative folks leading the charge. You don’t want someone who is stuck in the past or in the day-to-day—someone who isn’t forward- and future-looking—because that’s who you need.

You have plenty of people who are going to provide the guardrails and framework, right?

You need someone who is going to push against the framework, but you also need those other folks, like we always have, because we have to be risk-averse.

That’s right.

You need them to balance each other out. You need to have both.

Love it. All right. The Nike strategy of AI: We’ve got to just do it and iterate our way through it.

Yep.

Prototype to success. Do it.

Love it.