[00:00:00] Alenka Grealish: I think Gen-AI is going to be in banking behind the scenes, improving intelligent virtual assistance. So in the area of like intent recognition, clearly IVAs had room to grow and generative AI behind the scenes can do really well in interpreting and getting it right. The, consumer’s intent.

[00:00:25] Intro: The Digital Banking Podcast is powered by Tyfone.

[00:00:31]Intro: Tyfone is the creator of nFinia, a ally better digital banking platform for community financial institutions, as well as several platform agnostic revenue generating point solutions. Our highly configurable platform and broad ecosystem of third party partners ensure our entire suite is scalable and extensible to meet the needs of NEFI.

[00:00:52] Intro: On our podcast, you will hear host Josh DeTar, discuss today’s most pressing financial technology topics with seasoned industry experts from every possible discipline.

[00:01:11] Josh DeTar: Welcome to another episode of the Digital Banking Podcast.

[00:01:15] Josh: My guest today is Alenka Grealish, principal analyst for selling my product is Ethereal. That’s a pretty intriguing way to start a conversation, don’t you think? As an analyst, Alenka gets to see a lot of what’s happening and make educated predictions on what’s to come, what comes out of this research and thought?

[00:01:35] Josh: Well, as she used to tell her kids when they were younger, I write long stories for big people. I have to add the comedic element to this though. one day one of her son’s classmates parents asked her, Hey, so what exactly do you do? Your son says you write adult stories. Alenka said, I’ve always been adventurous and like to think of myself as an open-minded post perennial graduate student.

[00:02:02] Josh: I like to learn and to be a continual learner. I also like to teach and feel it’s a great way to give back. Now this probably stems from her father being a professor. He taught in a handful of different countries, and this included traveling to and teaching in developing countries. And this really gave alenka great exposure at a young age. She learned to have her eyes open, to adapt and to learn to understand different ways of thinking. this really helped later in life when her first job was with a bunch of PhDs at the Federal Reserve. You gotta learn fast. She was then brought into Boston Consulting in the Financial Services Practices Group.

[00:02:43] Josh: And again, she had to learn. She knew about finance, but not necessarily financial services. Her passion for the CFI space though is multi-pronged with a deep rooted understanding of the positive force for good change and the driver of economic growth they can be for the communities that they serve. Going further into this, she has a special place in her heart for small businesses and the CFIs that serve them these days. She’s diving deep into the world of ai. buzzword. I know, but trust me, she really knows what she’s talking about here. sees AI as a way to power step change. Like bees, AI touches more than you know, and that’s only becoming more and more true by the day. And as a resident of the stunning Bend organ area, you can find Lenka on weekends decompressing while learning something new and proving to herself she can do anything she puts her mind to by doing any of her three current cycling disciplines. Road, mountain, and now Gravel. Curious, I feel like we should probably start there.

[00:03:53] Josh: Alenka. So first off, welcome to the show.

[00:03:56] Alenka: Well, thanks a lot, Josh, for having me.

[00:03:58] Josh: Yeah, well, so we gotta start there. So, so what does Gravel Curious.

[00:04:04] Alenka: So road cycling’s, very straightforward. mountain biking, you just have to overcome your fear. Gravel is somewhere in between where you’re not sure what your bike can do and mountain biking. You usually ask less of your bike, then it can do for you. At least I do. And so gravel curious means I’m gonna explore how far I can take gravel, what kind of routes I can do confidently, and not biff.

[00:04:35] Josh: for those of you who don’t know, I highly encourage if you ever get a chance, really any of the seasons, ’cause there’s always something to do. Check out Bend, Oregon. I mean, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s high desert, so you get true full-blown summers with heat waves big enough that you can like inner Tube down the river to, you know, skiing in the winter.

[00:04:55] Josh: That’s some of the most amazing skiing and powder that you’ll do. but yeah, biking culture is, it’s a thing That’s

[00:05:04] Alenka: And it extends to people in their nineties. You think, whoa, am I pushing my envelope? And then somebody who’s like 70 zips by and you’re like, Nope, I’ve got a couple decades.

[00:05:17] Josh: I’m good. Yeah, no, but I mean there’s just so many trails and things. I mean, you could probably what, pick a new trail every single day for years and still never hit the

[00:05:27] Alenka: Almost. Almost. Yeah. I’m just

[00:05:30] Josh: well, okay, so one other thing that I wanted to come back to when we were talking earlier, you made the comment that AI is like bees. I thought that was really cool. I, I’d never really thought about it that way. I, I appreciated the analogy of, you to kind of talk through this a little bit more, but like you were talking about

[00:05:52] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:52] Josh: we don’t really realize just how much bees actually do.

[00:05:56] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:57] Josh: of an element of the fabric of our, like ecosystem they are.

[00:06:02] Josh: And then you start looking into it and you’re like, holy crap. Like they kind of touch everything. and you were likening that to ai. So tell me a little bit more about where your head’s at with that.

[00:06:13] Alenka: Yeah, sure. So I, I think the fact that bees pollinate over 80% of our produce is similar to where AI gen AI is going, where it’s a critical part of what the consumer has. but we don’t realize it. Right. And I think ai, gen AI is gonna be behind a lot of things already. It’s in front of things, right?

[00:06:36] Alenka: Consumers know they’re talking to Gen AI when they use Gemini or open AI or co-pilot. but it’s gonna be increasingly behind the scenes as well. And so could it be 80% of our touch points somewhere? There’s gen ai, possibly.

[00:06:54] Josh: Yeah, no, I think, I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about just the shift in how, you know people have experienced ai. Because there’s also a really wide range of people in their experience with

[00:07:07] Alenka: I

[00:07:07] Josh: You’ve got the, you know, hardcore techie nerds that have been following this for decades. And when you tell ’em how, you know, cool, this new AI thing is, they’re like, this is not new.

[00:07:16] Josh: Like we’ve been playing around with

[00:07:17] Alenka: mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:07:19] Josh: know, all the way to the people that are like, oh, have you heard about this new AI thing? It’s kind of cool. Right? So you have that, and then on top of that, you just have the different ways in which you can interact with it.

[00:07:29] Josh: Like you were saying, you know, everything from just going to chat GPT and asking it to write you a joke to actually full blown, full-blown AG agentic ai, and, you know, asking it to do things for you. And kind of the whole gamut of, you know, possibilities that come out of that. So, you know, what’s been kind of your experience in just seeing the different variations of that?

[00:07:54] Alenka: well, I started writing about AI in the middle back office over 20 years ago. strong use cases and fraud and compliance, right? So it was behind the scenes doing a lot of heavy lifting that was only transparent in some aggregate metrics like. Payment fraud reduction, or improved compliance efficiency.

[00:08:17] Alenka: And now we’re seeing classic AI being piled on with generative ai, and it’s actually now touching consumers and it’s being democratized within financial institutions where AI assistance are being pushed to employees. So that’s the whole BB pollination analogy is now for the first time, it’s, it’s a consumer product.

[00:08:45] Alenka: Right. That was the big breakthrough over almost two, three years now ago, right?

[00:08:51] Josh: that’s kind of crazy to think, isn’t it? well, I mean, I should know this, but I’m just, I’m terrible with timelines. I don’t know why. Um, everything was yesterday and a million years ago in my head.

[00:09:01] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:02] Josh: I mean, when would you say like chat GPT hit kind of mainstream, where like your neighbors who don’t even work in an industry that would be focusing on something like AI are like, Hey, I started playing around with chat.

[00:09:15] Josh: GPT.

[00:09:17] Alenka: I, I’d say it depends the generation, right? So November, 2022, boom. the big bang happens. And by that Christmas break I was talking to my kids’ generation. My kids are in their twenties and they were already using it. I was like, aha. And they were using, some of them were using it in a work context. So even though the other generations, the companies weren’t at all to a point where they’re even doing proof of concepts.

[00:09:52] Alenka: the young people were already exploring it. And that’s when I had this aha, this is shape shifting. I, I’d say when it became more common across generations, it probably took a year or two really to, to span. and I look at my friends that aren’t in financial services, aren’t in technology, and I’d say the past few six months they’ve got confident with prompt prompting and getting answers that made sense.

[00:10:24] Alenka: And I see a lot of my generation talking to their phones more and more because that’s the fastest way to communicate, a prompt to a gen, ei, driven interface.

[00:10:35] Josh: Yeah. That’s crazy. I, yeah, I guess I did not have that math in my head. It’s been over two and a half years since the, as you call it, big bang. Right. That’s

[00:10:44] Alenka: Yeah.

[00:10:46] Josh: and you think of just how far it has come in that timeframe, it like mind boggling. And I think that kind of speaks to what you were talking about, the ability to just kind of power step. but before we talk about that, I want to, to talk about what you were saying with just the, the different age demographics, utilization of it, and just how people are using it. I’ve found that really interesting too. Like it’s interesting to watch people figure out like, prompt engineering is gonna be the next skill that we need to teach people. It’s funny, right? Like, but I think I’ve used this example before, but my, um, I was telling you I did a, a backyard renovation project, right? Well, what started it was my wife wanted, to tear out a big section of our backyard and put in raised garden beds, she wanted to start doing a garden. And, and we had, I, like, I use, you know, I, I think at this point I would die without all of my AI tools. I don’t know how I would function in my job, but, you know, my wife, hasn’t really been using it much. It was really the, it was actually a Disney trip that was the catalyst for her. Funny enough, I’ll tell you about that here in a second.

[00:11:55] Josh: You find that funny. But, but it was interesting to then watch her where she really started to say, I’m gonna stop doing this stuff on my own. I’m just gonna talk to my agent was planning her garden, and she literally told

[00:12:09] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:12:10] Josh: She’s like, Hey, here’s where I live. Here’s the kinds of foods my kids will eat.

[00:12:15] Josh: Like, here’s the space

[00:12:17] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:12:17] Josh: have, the soil that I have, all of this. And she’s like, help me plan a garden. she just ended up having this whole conversation. And that was exactly it. Lanka, she would just sit on our couch at night after the kids went to bed and she was just talking to her phone and she was just talking

[00:12:31] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:12:31] Josh: forth with Chachi PT and having, and she was just treating it like a human.

[00:12:36] Josh: And that was the big switch for her was she stopped trying to like, almost overthink her prompts and just talk to it. Like, Hey, if you were to ask a human. Like if you were to go meet a master gardener and be like, Hey, I’m trying to plan this garden. Like how would you talk to that master gardener? And so that’s how she started talking to Chachi pt. And the long and short of it is Chachi pt, a hundred percent planned her entire freaking garden for her right down to drawing her schematics of where to plant everything and how far it should be and where she should put barriers for soil differentiation. It told her exactly how she should run the drip system for all of the watering and said, you know, run a line here.

[00:13:20] Josh: Drop it here this far from the plant. You know, put a one gallon per hour dripper on this one, put a sprayer on this one. I mean, the whole nine yards, right? But it was just, it was kind of fascinating for me to watch her go through that evolution. And now she’s just to the

[00:13:36] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:37] Josh: were saying, she’s just so comfortable.

[00:13:38] Josh: She just talks to her phone, like her personal assistant and tells it to do things for her. It’s kind of cool to watch.

[00:13:46] Alenka: Yeah, just watch out when she starts talking to you like that. Right.

[00:13:49] Josh: I know right.

[00:13:52] Alenka: Um, you know, I, I thinkwhen I see people do these projects, which would’ve taken a myriad set of experts, right? Irrigation soil, plant choice, sunlight, exposure hours, you can now get in one AI assistant and it’s trust building.

[00:14:13] Alenka: I think that that’s the key is you start in areas where I always tell my kids when they’re adventurous, I’m like, does it fail well or does it fail badly? Right? You wanna start with fail. Well, you, you’re not gonna fail badly going up the tree or something. it’s like that with generative ai. You start where it fails.

[00:14:35] Alenka: Well. Yeah, so the irrigation bombs, that’s okay. You can fix the irrigation and you build that trust and then you get bolder in what you’re asking, and you always still wanna double check, as you get bolder. But I think it’s, it’s this easy consumer, engagement and the coalescence of a bunch of experts in your phone that, oh, you go, oh, you know, maybe I’m gonna ask about financial planning next.

[00:15:06] Alenka: or something that’s higher stake. And I know we’re gonna get into digital banking, eventually, so I’m giving you a lead in, in the on-ramp here. But I think it’s, you start Easy Trust Foundation gets cemented and then there’s more, uh, interesting use cases, or not interesting, but, more complicated use cases where.

[00:15:30] Alenka: The margin of error gets smaller.

[00:15:33] Josh: Yeah, I’m curious if you’ve seen some of this in your conversations with people, as you’ve done your research. You know, I’ve talked to a lot of people where I talk to ’em about, you know, Hey, how are you using ai? And a lot of people either respond with I’m not, or I use it very little, and it is because the trust factor is not there is ultimately what, you know, I kind of learn out of the conversation with them about it, they’re like, well, you know, I, I noticed it made some pretty grotesque errors. I’m like, yeah, absolutely. I make some pretty grotesque errors too. And thankfully SVA hasn’t fired me yet. You know? but it’s because I would say at least 80% of the time, I’m, I’m right. Right. I’m doing a pretty good job. It’s like, keep me around. and that’s kind of how I treat, AI as well. Right. To your point, like I’m not gonna give it a hundred percent trust and I’m just gonna blindly say whatever it came up with I’m running with, I’m always gonna validate. let’s say it only got me 80% of the way there. Who cares? I’m 80% of the way there, a heck of a

[00:16:39] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:39] Josh: faster than I would’ve been. And now the time it takes me to edit the 20% is a lot shorter than the time it would’ve taken me to produce a hundred percent. You know what I mean?

[00:16:50] Alenka: Mm-hmm. No, I think that that’s a good way to describe it.

[00:16:53] Josh: But do you feel like you’re, like, have you heard that from folks? Like what are your

[00:17:00] Alenka: Not quite that analytically. I think it’s more happenstance. Like, uh, people are, they give aiy some wiggle room. Okay. You flopped here. Maybe it was my prompt, or maybe this is just too complicated, but you did well here. So I think there’s some slack that’s being given and with better prompt engineering, better models, or not better models, but model improvements, you’re going to get less of those flops.

[00:17:35] Josh: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s what too, you know, especially when I talk to people who are like, you know, I haven’t been using it because I don’t feel like I can a hundred percent trust it yet. I’m like, look, use it today. Use it again tomorrow and tell me just how much better it is. Like, I mean, it’s wild how fast this stuff happens. And so that kind of goes back to what, what I wanted to get your perspective on is you were talking about how, you see AI as like a power step up. It’s not necessarily like the, you know, gradual slope of the impact

[00:18:06] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:18:06] Josh: seen from technology in the past. It’s something different.

[00:18:10] Alenka: Yo A absolutely. When you look at the hard numbers, the efficiency gains, productivity gains that banks are realizing it’s, they’re double digits and usually it’s single digits. It’s incremental. But to scale quickly across a call center and realize 40%, increased NPS, um, 50% increase in age and productivity, those are hard numbers and unprecedented, you know, double digit numbers.

[00:18:47] Josh: What are some of the cool examples you’ve seen from some of the banks and CFIs that you’re talking to of just different ways? Like you said, that they’ve been able to take a massive leap that may have, in traditional senses, taken ’em a lot longer to accomplish.

[00:19:01] Alenka: Well, I think certainly the strongest use case has been in for CFIs retail. small business is in the call centers, and it, it spans from allowing a experienced agent to respond faster to a. New agent to respond correctly, right? And in making the job easier, I think the dividend that doesn’t always get recognized because it’s indirect, is talent, retention and attraction, right?

[00:19:38] Alenka: There’s a lot of turnover in certain, banking roles like call centers. and if you could retain your best talent because you make their job easier and more rewarding, often they deal with unhappy journeys, right? If they could turn those journeys into something positive for the customer, they get that, positive, credit to their account.

[00:20:03] Alenka: And if you can make onboarding new agents easier and faster, that also makes that journey. And if you start saying, oh, to agents when you’re recruiting them, and this also spans to. Business bankers, relationship managers, you can say we have all these great tools to make your job less boring, mundane, you know, this fraction of time is gonna be now value add, it’s gonna grow the pie.

[00:20:35] Alenka: You know, it’s land of here, the pie is growing and you’re gonna have the ability to do more value add. You’ll say, oh, am I gonna take a bank, a job with this bank, or the bank over here that’s still doing swivel chair data entry, et cetera. and flooding my inbox with customer emails and no real way to triage and so on.

[00:20:59] Alenka: You’ll say, oh, I’m going with bank gen, gen ai.

[00:21:02] Josh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think too, like you were saying, it’s a big, big value add in just knowledge transfer. know, this industry’s so complicated and it’s one, I think one of the reasons why, well, one, it’s just, it’s a great industry and people have, you know, a positive impact by being in it. So they like to stick around. And I think that just the culture of CFIs promotes it. But you do, you get people who are like, you know, oh, I’m the young pup. I’ve only been at the bank for 20 years, you know, and the problem is, is that when they retire, where does that 20 years worth of knowledge go?

[00:21:35] Josh: and you know, I’d like to think that the next generation of the workforce is gonna be as loyal in the CFI space as the outgoing one, are they, I mean, if you look at the data, right, most younger people only stay in jobs for a year or two, then they’re onto the next one. So, you know, especially in some of your critical positions, like you’re saying in call centers, know, if you’re only retaining talent for a year or two, how do you manage knowledge transfer? how do you manage this massive repository? And, you know, having your own internal knowledge library an agent that sits on top of it, where your staff can just go and query in real time and get hundreds of years of expertise from bankers at your bank, all loaded into that. That’s more powerful than just one person that’s been there for 20 years.

[00:22:35] Alenka: Yeah. You know, I think, young people, they’re, they’re used to shorter gratification cycles, right? It’s like, I do this and I get this feedback. and they probably carry that to their jobs. And if you can build that sense of confidence gratification that, oh, I’m helping this customer, whether it’s a consumer or a small business, again, that’s, that’s very reinforcing.

[00:23:02] Alenka: And when they know that they can ask an AI agent stupid questions that they might not wanna ask their manager, again, big comfort zone gets built. and I think that that’s gonna be really critical to CFIs that wanna recruit, bright, ambitious young people. That wanna have that more quick gratification, job satisfaction, sense of, um, learning and ability to advance in, in the organization.

[00:23:35] Josh: what else you got? So big impact in call centers. What do you think about, chatbots?

[00:23:40] Alenka: Yeah. I, I think Gene AI is going to be in banking behind the scenes, improving intelligent virtual assistance. So in the area of like intent recognition, clearly IVAs had room to grow and generative AI behind the scenes can do really well in interpreting and getting it right. the consumer’s intent.

[00:24:06] Alenka: I’d say also the natural language interface, the ability to. Speak to an IBA and have that correctly interpreted using slang, whatever. again, Jenny i’s just going to keep raising the hit rate, the bar, on getting it right for that consumer quickly and not having to necessarily escalate to, to a human.

[00:24:31] Alenka: So I think that that’s another area that I get excited about. middle back office still, there’s room, coding co-development is, is a big area where probably not as much co-development, build in CFIs, but their tech vendors are able to use code development and then that dividend gets passed down to the CFI because they get.

[00:24:58] Alenka: More, shorter cycle times to the enhancements, you know, v whatever. and you talked about knowledge transfer coding, right? So there’s still COBOL sloshing around in the financial services industry and who knows cobol, right? And the ability to, um, have models be the COBOL gurus is can be quite, quite powerful.

[00:25:22] Josh: Yeah, that’s an interesting, you know, Just talking about how that can help with code development for CFIs. you know, this is something I’ve talked about quite a few times on the podcast. You know, there’s a huge challenge for, you know, and this may be an unpopular opinion. I don’t know, nobody’s yelled at me in the parking lot yet, but, you know, there’s a huge challenge for community financial institutions to hire and retain top talent when it comes to code development and, you know, tech engineering.

[00:25:51] Josh: And, we struggle. We’re a tech company and it can be hard for us to attract top tier talent,

[00:25:57] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:58] Josh: if I post a job that is a really high salary base, maybe for Typhoon and, you know, for our, you know, engineering group and it’s, you know, $10 an hour, let’s call it, and I’m interviewing a killer candidate, and then Google calls ’em and says, yeah, we’ll give you 50 an hour. Like I can’t match that for one and two, what do you, which job do you think that, you know, developer is gonna take? It’s take that $50 an hour Google job. Right? And I’m not saying that’s, you know, always the but you know, then you also have to have a very specific culture that those types of sub people like to align to and work in, right?

[00:26:39] Josh: They like fast-paced environments. They like autonomy, they don’t like a lot of oversight, right? They wanna build cool things. They want to innovate, they want to use the newest and coolest tools. They want to use all this ai. And a lot of times, you know, financial institutions, one, they don’t have a lot of those people, so they’re kind of in an island of their own.

[00:27:00] Josh: They’re like, I have maybe one or two colleagues that are like me, that think like me, right? That do the same job as me. But pretty much everybody else is bankers. And then on top of that, they’re having to compete on salary, location flexibility, and work from home and things like that. And all the perks that the, you know, software companies bake into their culture. so it can be really hard to find and retain top talent. and then even then, a lot of times it’s very small teams, right? But what if you can incentivize a very small team to do some really cool stuff using AI tools? Right now you almost act like you have a team of 50 developers and you actually only have two, but you have two people and 48 agents, you know, and, I mean, our CEO sva, SVA was telling me he’s, got a brother that works for a tech company and his brother used to manage, and I’ll get the numbers wrong, so I apologize, sva, but, I’ll get close enough. He, his brother used to manage a team of like. a hundred developers, right? now he manages a team of like three a hundred

[00:28:14] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:15] Josh: and his team of three is

[00:28:17] Alenka: Yeah.

[00:28:17] Josh: effective and efficient than his team of a hundred was. So that can be passed on to financial institutions that actually do wanna do some stuff in-house, but have maybe struggled with it in the past.

[00:28:30] Alenka: Yeah. You know, I think, I’ll get back to kind of ground level developer talent stuff. but what, what I’m heartened to see at the FIS that I gauge with which range. The gamut from my own community bank, as a consumer to the big tier ones is there is a cultural shift. technology isn’t an ivory tower that you, you know, lob over requests that get queued up.

[00:29:01] Alenka: They’re at the table. City opposite lines of business heads, product owners, channel owners. There is a community sense that we’ve got to collaborate, we’ve got to work as a team, we’ve gotta bring in compliance and legal early in the process. And while they’re often the land of no, and they’re counteracted by the land of yes.

[00:29:25] Alenka: You know, somewhere in between things actually get to. POC pilot and then production, but it takes that community table. and I’m hardened to see that that’s happening more and more. Then you bring in gen AI and the democratization of access to cutting edge technology. So a CFI can have one eager curious point person for gen AI who can start playing, get the API start playing with these models and do really interesting things that you couldn’t do that 10 years ago with the latest technology, right?

[00:30:07] Alenka: You’d need an army, or you could have one developer that’s in charge of developing certain APIs or what have you, and say, go for it. Use a gen AI tool here. Test. The various tools because not all models are created equal for all use cases. so I, I think it’s a great confluence of cultural shift confidence in the teammanship of bringing in technology engineers, et cetera, to talk to marketers, talk to product people, and build things.

[00:30:42] Alenka: at the CFI level, which you just would not have been possible five years ago even.

[00:30:48] Josh: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s crazy what I mean, you can

[00:30:51] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:52] Josh: in code in AI now. what was it?

[00:30:55] Alenka: I’ve coded stuff. I’m not a coder. I’m like, how, how do I write this macro in my, in Excel?

[00:31:02] Josh: Yeah, absolutely. it’s funny, I was talking to recon, our head of AI recently. And he was telling me, one real example and then one funny like meme that he had seen online, that he posted in our like leadership Slack channel. And he was saying, who was it? It was, oh gosh, it’s the, I think it was Airbnb. Don’t quote me on this, but I think it was Airbnb, wanted to do a full code rewrite update and they rewrote like their entire platform. They wrote an AI platform to rewrite their code, and that took a couple of

[00:31:39] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:31:40] Josh: and then it rewrote their whole code in something silly Alenka, like four minutes or something like ridiculous like that, right?

[00:31:48] Josh: With

[00:31:48] Alenka: Yeah.

[00:31:49] Josh: very little error. And then they just validated, tested, updated, and they were talking about just like what this would have taken them without the tools that they used. And he said, so, you know, we’re getting to the point where it can do that. But then he posted this meme right behind it and he was like, it said something to the effect of like, I reran all of our code through Claude.

[00:32:09] Josh: And, it did an absolutely amazing job. It cleaned up 137 lines of code. It simplified, you know, 211 lines of code. It rewrote it in a more beautiful structure. It was absolutely perfect. None of it worked. but it was beautiful. Right. And so back to what you were talking about earlier, you know, it, it’s validate, but like you were saying, I mean, if you can get to 80% of the code, you know,

[00:32:38] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:38] Josh: that look like for a CFI to, like you said, have, have an eager developer using AI tools to at least get 80% of the way there and then sit at a table with a vendor to finish out the 20%. Right. And maybe that helps speed co-development. so I think there’s gonna be, like you said, kind of a, a huge power step, but what are you seeing in terms of, of banks and credit unions allowing their staff to use tools for things like that? Like how mainstream do you think that’s gotten?

[00:33:09] Alenka: it, you know, cautious, right? you know, employees if you’re in the C-suite, you know, employees are using tools on their phone, maybe they’re just testing a market message or what have you. but once you bring it within the firewalls, you have to have guardrails. you have to say, okay, this is how much you can do on your phone, how much you need to do in a sandbox.

[00:33:35] Alenka: I think Sandbox is, is a great new, not so new, but a concept that is gaining traction at smaller institutions. You know, have, have a little playground where you can test and learn and fail fast and test and improve, right? but, it’s cautious. You’re not gonna let a coder just start rewriting your core interface or what have you.

[00:34:03] Josh: I actually just recorded an episode the other day, with a guy who, it used to be the CSO for one of the biggest credit and debit card processors in Switzerland, and we were talking about kind of security posture. what’s funny is we touched on AI utilization a little bit, but that wasn’t really the topic of, of conversation he was made or the point that he was making with this.

[00:34:30] Josh: But I think it applies here in what you were saying, like, you know, people are using it on their phones. And he was talking about, security policies and specifically cybersecurity policies. And he was like, look, you know, there’s, there’s the policy that you want to create because if followed flawlessly, it’ll create a perfect security posture. But then there’s the policy that people will actually follow. And he is like, the example is if you create this ridiculous policy, right? And if the policy is, you have to change your password every single day and make it stronger every single day, and you have to add a character every single day, right? point people are gonna figure out a workaround around that ’cause they’re just not gonna follow the policy, right? And then ultimately what that creates is actually a weaker policy than if you had not created that policy in the first place. And he was kind

[00:35:25] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:25] Josh: same thing with like utilization of tools.

[00:35:27] Josh: And so, you know, if our policy is you’re not allowed to use ai. I absolutely guarantee you your top performers are using it. They’re just not telling you about it. Or they’re finding loopholes or like you said, they’re doing it on their personal and that actually creates a bigger security risk

[00:35:47] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:48] Josh: maybe they’re taking data off of their work computer to run it through AI on their personal computer.

[00:35:54] Josh: ’cause they’re locked outta AI on their work

[00:35:57] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:58] Josh: Right? And that’s actually worse than creating a posture around, Hey, we know we’re gonna, you’re gonna use these tools, so here’s how to do it safely. Um, here’s how to do it in a sandbox. Um, here’s how to do it in a way that protects our financial institution, but still allows you access to those tools.

[00:36:16] Alenka: Mm-hmm. No, absolutely. You know, at at a gen AI level, I, barriers are the mother of invention. And China’s deep seek is a great example of that, right? you’ve made it really hard to get the highest performing chips. And so, oh, you know, we’re gonna work around it. We’re gonna create something new, we’ll figure it out.

[00:36:38] Alenka: And it was just, I, I think, that person you, you spoke with is spot, spot on. ’cause if you become way too prescriptive, restrictive, there’s gonna be a roundabouts. I. And you don’t have visibility. The hardest, the challenge is then you’ve lost visibility because if you make it useful, constructive within your dashboard, you can track it and say, okay, this is where this is going to stray.

[00:37:07] Alenka: Maybe we need to realign, or, oh, we’ve been too restrictive here. Let’s bump it out a little. and it becomes a win-win as opposed to eventually a lose lose.

[00:37:18] Josh: Yeah.

[00:37:19] Alenka: But another thing I’d, I’d add is banks that just build the walls and say, whoop, no ai, no Gen AI are gonna be forced to learn about AI and gen ai because they’re gonna be the victims of bad actors.

[00:37:37] Alenka: Their customers will be victims. Their own systems are vulnerable to, variety of breaches, et cetera, because they haven’t. Try to understand and the best way to understand is play, play with the tools and say, Ooh, can I create a deep fake, of one of my customers? And oh yeah, I can. That’s pretty scary.

[00:38:01] Josh: yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised too if, for a lot of folks this may be similar to like, the shift from on-prem to cloud, right? I mean, I remember when, you know, that was first starting to become a thing. The percentage of people that were scared of it versus jumping right in was really lopsided, right? And then it reaches kind of a tipping point where it’s like, ah, most people are pretty comfortable with moving to the cloud. And then, you know, even still today you have laggards that are like, ah, we’re not, we don’t, we don’t know how we feel about the cloud, and is it really safe? And it’s like, well, I mean, you know, Department of Defense has stuff in the cloud and, you know, all of HIPAA’s in the cloud.

[00:38:44] Josh: So I, I think it’s probably pretty decent at this point. Like, you’re gonna see the same thing with ai, right? You’re gonna see a lot of people that are like, ah, we’re just, we’re not gonna touch that. And then you’re gonna see a tipping point where it’s like, Hey, the vast majority of us are finding ways to use this because just like the cloud, right? I mean, if you’re AWS you wanna build this thing in a way. Where absolutely you can get as many people into your cloud as possible. So you’ve gotta make it a sellable tool. So you’ve

[00:39:09] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:39:09] Josh: find ways around objections of people that don’t wanna put their stuff in the cloud. That’s, you’re seeing the same stuff with ai, right?

[00:39:17] Josh: I mean, immediately you have a company, especially like ours that does, I mean, you know, with what we do in digital banking, we have access to sensitive information, right? We have to take that extremely serious. We cannot just go taking, you know, customer data and dumping that into, you know, a personal laptop, open AI chat conversation, And they know that. So they create corporate tools with security protocols around that allow organizations to have protections for data to be able to use. So these tools are being developed so that you can use them because they want to sell you their

[00:39:58] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:59] Josh: right? Like that’s kind of the

[00:40:00] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:01] Josh: So I think a lot of the objections that people have with utilizing tools like ai, just like what you saw with, you know, early objections to moving to cloud, they’re gonna get resolved and you’re gonna get to the point where you’re gonna kind of run out of objections to use tools like ai.

[00:40:15] Alenka: Yeah. The bit of irony is if you’re not in the cloud, it’s hard to use the geni tools.

[00:40:21] Josh: Yeah,

[00:40:22] Alenka: I

[00:40:22] Josh: yeah. You gotta take one leap before the

[00:40:24] Alenka: right.

[00:40:25] Josh: Yeah. So if we’re still having the conversation about being in the cloud, let’s maybe start there. but so you had some, some thoughts around the impact that AI is gonna have in the way people interact with systems and specifically digital banking.

[00:40:42] Josh: Right? So what are some of your thoughts there?

[00:40:45] Alenka: well, what, when I telescope, I think, Ooh, so I, I remember green screens, um, where you get your digital bank on a cd, et cetera. So what, what’s kind of the next step change here? And I think it’s going to be natural language interfaces. Why do I want to have to touch a screen or drop down? I just wanna talk to my digital bank and I may just be asking for balances or as things evolve with sufficient permissioned.

[00:41:20] Alenka: Guardrails, I might ask an AI agent to do a transaction, a low ticket transaction on my behalf. and then you get in the whole world of commerce. So commerce and payments is gonna intersect pretty quickly with the agentic ai, but I think it’s the natural evolution. You know, if I want to, if I’m a small business and I wanna see a chart, why should I have to hunt for the cashflow forecasting tab?

[00:41:47] Alenka: I’ll just say, gosh, I want my excesses to be this. Why this? Show? It to me, just everything bespoke, through some simple, simple prompts where the, end user doesn’t have to be really a prompt engineer. They just use natural language to describe what they want. And if the Geni agent doesn’t know how to respond, they come back with, well, did you mean this?

[00:42:15] Alenka: Oh, yes, yes, I meant that, or No, I meant this.

[00:42:18] Josh: Yeah.

[00:42:19] Alenka: And, oh, do you wanna take an action on this? Whoa, cash flow looks like it could be read in two weeks. Here are your options to avoid that. And then it becomes a really productive engagement.

[00:42:32] Josh: Yeah, it becomes a lot more prescriptive, right? I mean, I think this industry has

[00:42:35] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:36] Josh: about, about personalization for a long time, right? And I would argue that there are a lot of layers to what personalization looks like to consumers in banking, right? And there’s some low hanging fruit that’s like when I log in, talk to me like me, right?

[00:42:56] Josh: Show me things that are important to me. And there’s things like, you know, present relevant offers to me, that kind of stuff. I argue that’s pretty low hanging fruit, and that should be stuff that you’re able to do, you know, a long time ago. But I, I would tend to agree with you, I think the next evolution of personalization is what you’ll never, ever accomplish with ui. Right. There’s just too many combinations. Let’s say you serve a hundred thousand account holders. How am I ever gonna design a UI that looks the exactly the way Alenka wants and exactly the way Josh wants every time I log in? And the UI

[00:43:36] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:37] Josh: itself, or it gives you the ability to actually, you know, drag it around, or, hey, if you know, I like you know the buttons on the top and you like the buttons on the bottom, like, do that.

[00:43:49] Josh: And

[00:43:51] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:51] Josh: ending game of trying to have a better hierarchical menu. And there’s kind of a point of diminishing return. And at the end of the day, I’ve always argued like, why does somebody log into digital banking? It’s not because it’s cool, it’s not because they wanna play with it. because they need to learn something or accomplish something that revolves around money.

[00:44:13] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:13] Josh: it. And so when you talk about, just thinking about interacting with my money like an agent, that makes a heck of a lot more sense to me, right? Because exactly that. Like how, how do I, as a UI designer create every chart and graph that a small business owner would ever want to see about how to view my cash cashflow? But

[00:44:34] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:35] Josh: the business owner could just go in and say, Hey, you know, what will you, will you give me a, i’d, like a a bar graph that shows our sales versus our expenses break it out by quarter and make the sales bar blue and,

[00:44:54] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:55] Josh: it renders right? Then you now have an endless UI that is mated perfectly to what are they trying to learn or accomplish?

[00:45:06] Alenka: Yeah. You know, I think in, in a paradoxical way, it obsolesces personalization, right? Because you don’t need personalization when it’s totally interactive and bespoke. It’s real time.

[00:45:22] Josh: what, so you, you were talking about two, just being able to kind of have natural conversations with it. Just curious, what do you think, you know, consumers would think about that? Like if we just, tomorrow you logged into digital banking and instead of seeing anything, you just had a chat GPT bar that was like, what do you wanna know? Where do you wanna go? What do you wanna do?

[00:45:45] Alenka: I, I think you’re going to find growing utilization. I, I look, when I think about where we’re headed in small business banking reinvention, I look to the, accounting software in the cloud, like zero and sage and what they’re doing with a natural language interface. I said, this makes sense. They are paving the path At the same time, they’re setting expectations.

[00:46:13] Alenka: Consumers, they’re gonna have, for instance, style assistance. And that’s paving the path to expectations that I’m going to get exactly what I want, like what your wife’s experience was. I, I’d have to go to four departments in Home Depot to get all this knowledge if I get it at all. Right? So you’re setting expectations that are gonna transfer to the banking, context, and I think banking becomes.

[00:46:41] Alenka: Less, you know, I always come back to nouns versus verbs. banking will become more engaging and around a higher level goal of financial wellness, which means helping consumers and small businesses do financially finance related workflows better, faster, smarter,

[00:47:02] Josh: Yeah. I, so I love where you’re going with that personally because, again, maybe a, little bit of a,hot take on this. doesn’t work just

[00:47:15] Alenka: well-meaning. But

[00:47:17] Josh: It’s well-meaning, but it doesn’t work, right? People just,

[00:47:20] Alenka: yeah.

[00:47:21] Josh: go in, maybe they set it up right, but nobody really goes and looks and checks against their budget or things like that. some do, don’t get me wrong, right? But I’m saying as a tool to truly up level the financial health and wellness of America,

[00:47:41] Alenka: Yeah.

[00:47:41] Josh: not meeting the masses, right? I think that’s pretty obvious. So, I’ve referenced this book a few times. I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but there’s a book called Nobody Lies to Google.

[00:47:53] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:47:53] Josh: actually even more. now with things like chat, GPT, but the whole premise

[00:48:00] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:48:00] Josh: was talking about how, I always use, you know, me as the example, like if I go to my doctor, I’m gonna ask him, Hey, you know, is, is one cup of coffee, you know, too much coffee in a day? And my doctor would probably be like, no, yeah, one cup of coffee is fine and then I’m gonna come home and I’m gonna Google Hey is 1 64 ounce cup of coffee.

[00:48:24] Josh: Okay. Right. And the premise is, is that, you know, when, when we kind of obste who we’re talking to and there’s real no really no face of somebody there to judge us, even though we know like our doctor’s not necessarily supposed to judge us, or maybe the person at the bank is not supposed to judge the position that I’m in and my finances and the bad decisions that I’ve made. You know, a lot of times we take our pride into account and we withhold maybe some of the details. It probably would’ve been helpful. And so, you know, if I go in and say, Hey, am I spending too much on dining out monthly? Right? Am I really gonna ask somebody that? Maybe not. But if I could just go

[00:49:09] Alenka: Who would you ask? That’s the other thing.

[00:49:12] Josh: am I spending on dining out?

[00:49:13] Josh: Okay, that

[00:49:14] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:15] Josh: is that normal for some, like you see my, my cash flow, you see my intake, you see our other expenses. Like is that normal? And maybe it comes back and it says no, you know, you’re actually a little bit in your peer group on the high side. Would you like some strategies to help reduce that expense? Right. Then that’s not

[00:49:34] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:35] Josh: budget for dining out this month is a hundred bucks. Oh, well, crap, I blew through that again like I did last month. Oh well. know, it’s a lot more prescriptive

[00:49:44] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:45] Josh: And I think that is one of the areas where we’re gonna see, if done right, some really positive outcomes of allowing people to just interact with their finances through agents.

[00:49:59] Alenka: Yeah. You know, it’s as, as trust and verify, becomes part of the mantra. yeah, it’s a safe space, right?

[00:50:06] Josh: Yeah. Well, so I think one of the other things too, I’d be interested to get your comment on is, the other thing you have to be careful about is, you know, hallucinations in that. And I think that’s one of the

[00:50:17] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:50:17] Josh: why we’ve been, you know, as an industry a little bit slow to start to adopt. and I’ve, probably overused this example too, but like, you know, if. If I talk to this AI agent and it says, oh, Josh, we see that you have, you know, $5,000 in your checking account right now, and did you know your credit union has, you know, a 6% CD special running right now? Like, your money would be way better spent if you moved all 5,000 of that from your checking account to that cd. And I’m like, great, I’m gonna follow up on that advice. Let’s do it. And now I have $0 in my checking account and it’s, you know, May 29th and my mortgage is due June 1st, and I don’t get paid again until June 15th. I’m screwed. I now can’t make my mortgage payment, and now I’ve gotta try and early terminate that cd, get that money back.

[00:51:10] Josh: And this was a horrible idea for me. Right? So the thing can’t just make up shenanigans and we’ve gotta be really conscientious about that stuff, right?

[00:51:19] Alenka: No, no, a absolutely, and that’s where you gotta do a lot of testing. Humans in the loop, you know, your staff in the loop to push, push the models, try to get them to hallucinate, screw up, and put, you know, ring fed certain things, like set limits as to what. A size of CD could be offered for certain segments, et cetera.

[00:51:47] Alenka: But yeah, humans in loop are gonna be key for a while to, to mitigate, actually, just to prevent hallucinations.

[00:51:56] Josh: Yeah. I don’t know, there’s a little bit of a detour, but I think it’s important to note, like

[00:52:02] Alenka: Oh yeah, it,

[00:52:03] Josh: this is not gonna replace humans altogether.

[00:52:07] Alenka: no, certainly not. And it’s not a silver boil. It’s imperfect. It’s a trusted and verify, situation still, but some level of trust is, is needed to, to be able to harness it. And you need to play with it. Back to what I said earlier, you need to play with it, trust it to know how it can be used against you

[00:52:31] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:32] Alenka: because

[00:52:33] Josh: I think that’s a good, that’s a probably a solid takeaway for folks, right? Is especially if you’re in, you know, fraud, compliance, those areas, just understanding how it may be used against you is

[00:52:47] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:47] Josh: And you start, and how you start thinking about crafting some of your business strategies, some of your policies and

[00:52:52] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:53] Josh: right?

[00:52:54] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:55] Josh: if you think, oh, nobody could ever do that, they could with

[00:53:00] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:00] Josh: tool to help them, then that changes maybe your security posture about a certain type of event or certain thing, right?

[00:53:09] Alenka: And it also changes how you protect your customers, right? Digital banking, mobile apps. Mobile banking apps are great to send customers alerts about, oh wait, you had this transaction. Looks a little odd. Let us know. Um, you

[00:53:27] Josh: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:28] Alenka: also have to. Yeah, make sure your customer is aware of when it’s you sending that alert.

[00:53:35] Alenka: Um, and not some bad actor, uh, but I think mobile banking, it’s like, Hey, we got your back. And that’s again, another trust builder value add for consumers as well as commercial customers who are gonna be, I think, increasingly venerable to AI generated fraud.

[00:53:55] Josh: Oh yeah. I mean, you think about just the scalability of what it used to take for somebody

[00:54:01] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:02] Josh: you know, send out and follow up on a bunch of messages. For like a phishing scam. Now they can create AI agents

[00:54:11] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:11] Josh: ’em all the way to where they’re like, Hey, I got somebody on the line now, a human takeover and finish this thing out and drive it home. Right. That’s scary stuff.

[00:54:20] Alenka: Oh, it definitely is.

[00:54:21] Josh: you brought up something that, I wanted to get your perspective on too is, talking about kind of having, having the assurance that people trust, it’s really you, you know, I think one of the problems that we also see, and not just in banking, is, man, we have overused OTPs and we use ’em for everything with no context. And so, you know, people are so OTP blind at this point, like they don’t even pay

[00:54:49] Alenka: Hmm.

[00:54:49] Josh: to what they are because we do, we use OTPs for everything from someone from the call center needs to authenticate me. So we’re sending you an OTP

[00:54:58] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:59] Josh: hey, approve this transaction for a hundred thousand dollars. To you name it. And so people have just gotten so willing to give out those OTPs because they

[00:55:12] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:12] Josh: nothing to them anymore, that

[00:55:15] Alenka: Yeah.

[00:55:15] Josh: a really big problem in terms

[00:55:18] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:19] Josh: you know, people just willingly giving out access.

[00:55:23] Alenka: Yeah. No, there’s, and outside of banking, when they asked you to share your contacts to get access to an app and so on, you know, we’ve developed bad habits outside of banking that bleeds into banking as well. and it’s like, well, no, definitely don’t ever respond to this, et cetera. Whereas you can have a little less, vigilance outside of banking.

[00:55:51] Alenka: But yeah, the world outside of banking is not training as well for vigilance within banking. Yeah.

[00:56:00] Josh: so you were talking about earlier just the, the other thing that you were seeing kind of an interesting change in is the CFI space supporting small businesses. so what do you think is kind of the challenge and opportunity there?

[00:56:17] Alenka: I think the opportunity is CFIs are part of the local economy. That fabric, they’re critical to credit, right? Um, it’s, it’s very expensive, um, for any bank to underwrite a small ticket credit, you know, less than 250 K, but CFIs are, they don’t industrialize as much. But the economics are very hard when you don’t industrialize, right?

[00:56:47] Alenka: And now with tech advances, there’s ability to do the high tech in the background, but yet still have high touch because you can leverage AI data analytics to buoy up for a business banker, oh, here are your priority clients. Here’s one that is in the middle of a loan process, but they’ve missed this document.

[00:57:10] Alenka: And you could have, you know, an auto email sent. So the small business banker doesn’t have to chase as much. So I think technology’s making it possible to deliver high touch because less time is spent on the low value add stuff. and it allows the CFIs and credit unions can be more flexible in what they’re considering as long as again, they can make the operating.

[00:57:38] Alenka: Model work, the economics work, which means you need that high tech, you need third party vendors, that push, you know, the geni behind the scenes, to the CFI.

[00:57:51] Josh: Yeah. I, you know, I, I agree. I think there’s a huge opportunity and need for high touch and small banking, right? Because, you know, you think about it, you’re, you’re a florist, you can be a really good florist. You know nothing about business banking. You know what I mean?

[00:58:12] Alenka: Hm.

[00:58:12] Josh: just not your area of expertise. And so, you know, just. Even thinking about myself, like I, I’m one of those people, like, I don’t know about you. Like I’ve, I’ve never really had enough of a desire to start my own company. like I always say I, I make a really good number two, but I don’t think I ever wanna be number one. but I will say, even working in this industry, one of the biggest, like gating items for me of ever thinking about starting a business literally just understanding, setting up all the things that I would need to do to run the

[00:58:51] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:51] Josh: that are not the business.

[00:58:53] Josh: And a part of that is the banking side of things. And I work

[00:58:56] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:57] Josh: industry. Right. And so could you imagine like you’re somebody who really wants to start a flower shop and you’re really, really good at being a florist. But you never start it because you just don’t have somebody there to provide the high touch service that you need to suck all of the appropriate things you need to do to receive payments from your customers and pay your vendors, and all of the things that go along with being a florist that’s not making beautiful flower arrangements. You know? And so, you know, like you were saying from earlier, I mean, CFIs are literally the backbone of small community business, right? They understand that

[00:59:35] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:37] Josh: to, you know, help lend on businesses and projects in that community because they understand it, they know the people. But yeah, you’re right. I mean, economies of scale takes over. And at a certain point you’re like, Hey, look, I can only support this business that’s bringing us in this revenue with this kind of high touch. And even though these guys need it, I just don’t have the time and the resources to give it. But technology can bridge that pretty significantly, and it can help with a

[01:00:05] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:05] Josh: of the table stakes, transactional type of things, and allow you to focus on the more meaningful value add side of conversations and interactions and relationship.

[01:00:17] Alenka: No, absolutely. And there’s fintechs that are providing workflow optimization that could be, integrated into digital platforms like, like your own, right? And you’re doing that as well. And I think that’s really important is to help with the workflows. The products, small business gets a checking account.

[01:00:39] Alenka: They don’t know what merchant acquiring is, but they know they wanna accept cards and they’ll ask, you know, chat GPT, what are the ll the corporate documents I need, LLC, whatever it is, what’s the next step? What tax id? You know, they can get all that information. But it’s then running the financial side that I think digital banking is ripe to support those workflows, not just banking products.

[01:01:07] Alenka: Those are static, but the dynamic, workflows that a small business has to, has to manage.

[01:01:13] Josh: I tell you what, so, great use case and example. Exactly that. So my wife, she would like me to make this statement though before I make the following one, which is she’s been doing this before it became cool over COVID. But, she’s been one of those, homemade sourdough bread bakers and alenka, I’m not even kidding.

[01:01:32] Josh: She bakes a loaf a day at a bare minimum for just our family. then she’s constantly making bread for friends and neighbors and all sorts of different things, and she’s thought about turning it into a small little side business and a thought about setting it up as an LLC. And I mean, at the very least, just so you know, we can recoup some tax savings for all the spread.

[01:01:54] Josh: She’s bacon. And, and so, she was like, I don’t know, the first thing about setting up an LLC and where I would even start and where I would go,

[01:02:03] Alenka: Hmm.

[01:02:03] Josh: We literally just sat down and had a conversation with Gemini and just said, Hey, hey, look, here’s, here’s where we’re at. Here’s

[01:02:10] Alenka: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:02:12] Josh: it all out. And at the end of it, a beautiful point by point, step by step, day by day, what to do to set up an LLC to start selling your sourdough bread.

[01:02:24] Alenka: Yeah. And you know, then you layer on, we’re going to be using Gen ai, driven search, right? And so I’m not gonna go necessarily to Bankrate Monitor anymore. I may just go to Gemini or whichever and say, what’s the best small business bank in the Portland area? Right? and that CFI is going to have to start thinking about how they can get vacuumed up into that search and be one of the top results.

[01:02:54] Alenka: Right, because right now there’s, it’s not being monetized. There’s not advertising dollars driving the results yet, but certainly there’s consumers using, those, gen EI models to get results. And yeah, that’s a whole other, I think, podcasts to discuss the implications there,

[01:03:14] Josh: Oh, totally. No, I

[01:03:15] Alenka: but that, that would’ve been your next step, right?

[01:03:17] Josh: the backyard project, right? That was that was how I ultimately picked the turf and all the different

[01:03:24] Alenka: Yep.

[01:03:24] Josh: I used,

[01:03:26] Alenka: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[01:03:28] Josh: And I said, Hey look, you know, I live in Portland, Oregon. I’ve got two young kids, obviously, you know the climate around here, it’s hard for them to spend a lot of time outside.

[01:03:37] Josh: I’d like turf recommendations. And it was like, hey, well considering, you know, this is gonna be for kids. We want something that’s anti-microbial. We want something that, is soft, right? We want something that has fall protection. and we also wanna understand the drainage requirements of your area and how you get rain.

[01:03:58] Josh: And literally. And then it was like, and then we also have to recognize that you’re not a, commercial outfit, so you can’t buy direct from a distributor. You’re gonna have to

[01:04:08] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:09] Josh: you know, a local supplier or something. You also need a large role. So what about shipping? And literally walked me through until it helped make a recommendation for a product that my local Home Depot could get me. And so I never once touched Google. I never once talked to anyone. I never

[01:04:27] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:28] Josh: you know, home Depot to recommend a product. I didn’t even know I was gonna buy it through Home Depot. But Home Depot got a

[01:04:35] Alenka: Right.

[01:04:36] Josh: and that specific turf manufacturer got a sale because chat, GPT recommended that product to me. And actually, funny enough, this was actually so cool for me. this happened for the first time yesterday, and it may have happened before, but this was the first time somebody ever actually said it. had a discovery call with a bank that was wanting to talk to us about our products and services, and when I asked how they heard about us, he said, we found you on chat, GPT and chat

[01:05:04] Alenka: Wow.

[01:05:05] Josh: you. And I was like.

[01:05:07] Alenka: Hmm.

[01:05:07] Josh: right. Like that’s cool.

[01:05:09] Alenka: Wow. You’re doing something right.

[01:05:11] Josh: your culture, but two, that’s just cool to hear that. Yeah, that’s,

[01:05:16] Alenka: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You’re messaging. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, just to tie in financial services to your, uh, backyard project, what if it was a, like a play structure and you needed to finance it? That would’ve been your next question, right? Is, gosh, what are my choices to finance this? You know, you could say, oh, well, if you’re brave enough to share, you know, what’s your credit card limit?

[01:05:45] Alenka: how long do you need to pay? how much home equity do you have? Then you can say, Ooh, you know, I have, I have this bank. Are there banks, better banks for home equity in my, my region? Right? So you, it could have taken you quickly into a financial services direction.

[01:06:04] Josh: Oh, totally. I’d tell you what, like if this had been really smart Lanka, this is where it would’ve gone. you know, it started with me getting a quote for somebody to do this, and I literally fell over and passed out when I saw what people charge to install artificial turf. And I was like, screw that. I could do that myself.

[01:06:22] Josh: turns out now I know why they charge so much,

[01:06:26] Alenka: Oh, yeah.

[01:06:27] Josh: do that again. and, but as I was going through, what would’ve been really nice

[01:06:31] Alenka: But Chatt PD didn’t, didn’t dash your hopes. They said you could do it right. That, that encouraging GPT You could. You got this Josh. Go for it.

[01:06:43] Josh: No, it should have ended with an oh by the way. You’re gonna regret doing this yourself. Actually, if you take out a HELOC with your credit union and just finance this sucker, hire somebody to do this job. That’s how Chad GPT should have ended it. But, you know, that’s a story for another day, I guess. But no,

[01:07:02] Alenka: Indeed.

[01:07:03] Josh: fascinating to see.

[01:07:04] Josh: I I, I really do. I’m totally, I hope you’re cool with it. I’m gonna steal your B analogy. I think that’s so spot on for,

[01:07:11] Alenka: You can just ASIC it and give them my LinkedIn.

[01:07:16] Josh: yeah. no, but I, I, I think you’re so spot on with that, right? I think like, you know, if you were to ask the, the lay person who doesn’t understand, you know, b culture, like how much of an impact do you think bees have?

[01:07:30] Josh: You know, they might think, oh, you know, a fair amount, but

[01:07:33] Alenka: I like honey.

[01:07:34] Josh: it touches? Yeah,

[01:07:35] Alenka: Uh

[01:07:35] Josh: exactly. same thing with ai, right? Can be like, how

[01:07:40] Alenka: mm-hmm.

[01:07:40] Josh: touch? I don’t know, something. And then you start to dig in, you’re like, wow. Pretty much

[01:07:45] Alenka: Oh.

[01:07:46] Josh: now already. So I think there’s some pretty cool opportunities out there.

[01:07:51] Josh: It’s cool to see how financial services is really leveraging it to, like you said, kind of take a

[01:07:56] Alenka: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:57] Josh: step forward. but I mean, I just, I, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation with you and kind of chatting through, what this looks like. But before I, I let you go, two final questions for you. So first off, where do you go to get information?

[01:08:12] Josh: Like how are you staying up to date, especially in the world of AI with, you know, how fast stuff’s changing?

[01:08:18] Alenka: well, I have a lot of news feeds that are FinTech oriented and, you know, I subscribe to everything, all the big, you know, the hyperscalers, deliver. But I get where I take my curiosity is outside of the box, my box, and to get just a very kind of 10,000 different perspective. I read the Economist.

[01:08:43] Alenka: Anything they write on ai, to get the on the ground gossip backstories. I read the information

[01:08:54] Alenka: and yeah, you know, I think the thoughtful pieces come from the Atlantic and York Times and so on. So I try to get out of my box and just read objective pieces as well and know what’s happening on the ground. from the perspective of reporters in, in the va, you know, Silicon Valley.

[01:09:14] Josh: Yeah. and then if people want to connect with you or if they want to do some research by reading your long stories for big people, um, where can they connect with you and, and how can they access some of excellence content?

[01:09:31] Alenka: well email, a grish and that’s G as in George, R-E-A-L-I-S-H at celent, C-E-L-E-N t.com. And I also have a bunch of smart colleagues on the topic as well that cover different verticals. So happy to network them into the conversation. Yeah, I am, as I said, perennial learner, love to exchange views. so welcome, welcome further conversation.

[01:10:01] Josh: Awesome. Thank you. Well, again, this has been, uh, a really informative and I, I love when people are able to take really complex topics and distill ’em down to like simple analogies that, you know, people like me can actually understand. So that’s, today did a lot of that for me, so thank you.

[01:10:17] Alenka: Love your bees. Love your bees.

[01:10:20] Josh: the bees.

[01:10:21] Josh: They touch a lot, just like AI’s gonna Right. Well thank you for

[01:10:25] Alenka: Indeed.

[01:10:25] Josh: a guest on the Digital Banking podcast.

[01:10:27] Alenka: Oh my pleasure. It’s been a delight.

[01:10:30] Thank you for listening to the Digital Banking Podcast, powered by Tyfone. Find more episodes on digital banking podcast.com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.