AI won’t take your job. People using AI will, with Sachin Kundra.

In the latest episode of the Digital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar of Tyfone welcomed Sachin Kundra, CIO at Chevron Federal Credit Union. The conversation centered on what it actually looks like to run an “AI-first” credit union, and why Kundra believed AI was making us both dumber and smarter at the same time.

Kundra walked through real production use cases already running at Chevron FCU, an internal knowledge agent nicknamed Ask Yoda that over 250 employees used daily, and an outbound call-prep agent that cut a 25-minute manual research process down to seconds. Both were built in a matter of hours once the organization committed to an AI-first mindset, a shift that meant restructuring technical roles around agent development rather than one-off integrations.

The discussion closed on where digital banking was headed next. Kundra argued that chasing every fintech feature to check a box was a losing game, and that the real risk was not falling behind on functionality, but ending up with a disjointed experience. He went further, predicting that the banking app interface itself might eventually disappear in favor of a single chat-based front end for a member’s entire financial life.

Key Insights

AI Makes You Dumber and Smarter at the Same Time

Kundra compared AI to GPS navigation: reliance on it had genuinely eroded his sense of direction, to the point he sometimes couldn’t find his own way home without it. He argued the same trade-off was coming for knowledge work broadly, and he was fine with that trade. The capacity freed up by not doing menial, repetitive tasks got reinvested into higher-value thinking and better member experiences. His summary of the shift: AI was not going to take anyone’s job, but people who knew how to use AI were going to take the jobs of people who didn’t.

The Real ROI Test Isn’t Just the Math

When Kundra evaluated whether to build or automate something, he treated it as both an art and a science. A purely formulaic, quantitative approach missed initiatives that mattered for member experience even when the numbers alone didn’t justify the cost, and a purely qualitative approach missed genuine efficiency wins. Chevron FCU adopted an explicit AI-first mindset: before touching a keyboard or starting a project, the default question became whether AI had a role to play. Not everything made the cut, but the list of what was possible kept growing faster than any single team could act on it.

Chat Is Eating the Banking Interface

Kundra saw the ChatGPT and Plaid integration, which let a member connect their financial accounts directly into a chat interface, as an early signal of where digital banking was headed. He predicted that traditional UI and UX for banking would eventually become unnecessary as more of a member’s financial life, along with their calendar, family logistics, and more, got handled through a single conversational interface. That shift threatened dashboard-first aggregators like MX and Monarch, since the heavy lifting moved from the aggregation layer to the LLM itself. He was quick to flag the security question this raised: open banking access that broad meant a breach exposed far more than any single institution ever held.