20 posts tagged with "AI"

I have spent enough time building with AI agents on my own projects to be genuinely impressed by them. I have also spent enough time around banking to know that the harder I imagine putting one to work inside a bank, the faster I hit a wall, and the wall is not technical. It is governance. The moment software stops suggesting and starts acting, the frameworks a bank relies on to stay safe begin to strain.

The thing that finally made AI agents click for me was a small distinction. A chatbot can tell you how to reverse a fee. An agent can go reverse it. One explains the steps. The other takes them. Once I started playing with that on my own projects, the shift stopped feeling incremental and started feeling like a different category of tool.

When ChatGPT first showed up, I treated it like a magic trick. I'd throw prompts at it to see what it could do, marvel for a minute, and move on. Somewhere in the year and a half since, that changed without my really noticing. On my own projects, on my own time, these tools stopped being a novelty and became part of how I actually work. Not a thing I test. A thing I reach for.

For a while now, operations has struck me as the place where technology could do the most good inside a community bank. Not the headline projects. The day to day work of serving clients and moving loans through the pipeline. The easy assumption is that more automation is the goal in itself. I see it differently. The point of operations technology is to make the bank faster, more responsive, and easier to work with, for clients and for the people serving them. That is a different target than automation for its own sake.

The hardest part of using AI in banking is not the technology. It is figuring out where AI usage fits inside the vendor management discipline that banks already practice.

A year ago, ChatGPT showed up and changed the conversation. I've spent a lot of personal time since then digging into what these tools can actually do. My assumption going in was that everything would change overnight. What I've learned is more bounded, and more interesting, than that.

GPT-4 was released in March 2023, and I've had time since then to spend with it on personal projects, comparing it against 3.5. The difference is not subtle.

I've spent the last two months on personal time exploring ChatGPT, digging into how large language models work, and running it through every banking scenario I can think of. The wonder phase is fading. What's replacing it is a more practical question. Where could this eventually help at a community bank, and where would it get a bank in trouble?

After two weeks of playing with ChatGPT, I hit a point where "wow, it's good" wasn't enough. I wanted to understand what's actually happening when I type a prompt and get a coherent response. Not at a PhD level, but enough to move past treating it like a black box.

I wasn't prepared for ChatGPT. OpenAI released it on November 30th, it hit a million users in five days, and I signed up expecting the usual chatbot experience. Ask it something, get a mediocre response, close the tab. That is not what happened.