Good morning!
As you all know, we brought on an advisory board this year, and we just added our newest member: Shawn Dunn, VP of Data & Analytics at WSECU. One of the first things we got into was AI priority scores. Every C-suite rates it high, somewhere around an 8 out of 10. Almost nobody's execution matches that number.
That gap is what this issue is about, along with what Bank of America's latest earnings call reveals about AI at scale, and the payment-tech opening agentic commerce is creating for banks that move first.
TRENDING AI NEWS FOR CB
Bank of America says 300+ AI use cases are approved. Only 34 are fully live.
During BofA's Q2 earnings call, CEO Brian Moynihan said the bank's 200,000-plus employees are now generating more than 400,000 AI prompts a day. Of more than 300 approved AI use cases, only 34 are fully implemented in production.
Why it matters for your bank: Even a bank with BofA's budget is finding that governance is the bottleneck, not ideas. If they're stuck between approval and production at that scale, expect the same gap at yours, just smaller.
Agentic AI is about to start paying for things.
Total agentic commerce transaction value is projected to hit $8 billion in 2026 and grow to $3.5 trillion by 2031, according to Juniper Research. Cards dominate today, but as AI agents transact on customers' behalf, banks will need to support digital wallets and account-to-account rails built for a machine on the other end, not a human.
Why it matters for your bank: Most payment systems were built assuming a human is checking out. That assumption is starting to break, and the banks ready for it get first-mover advantage with the fintech partners building agentic checkout flows.
House Republicans want AI-powered fraud detection, and a funded pilot for community banks
A report from Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, following a year-long investigation into financial fraud, endorses wider use of AI-powered fraud detection tools. The framework includes the Bank Fraud Technology Advancement Act, which would create a fraud technology pilot program specifically for community banks, plus stronger legal protection for banks that share fraud information with each other.
Why it matters for your bank: This is committee-level momentum, not a floor vote yet, but it signals where funding and safe harbors are headed. If a community bank fraud tech pilot becomes real, being first in line matters more than being first to build.
DEEP DIVE
Your C-Suite Rated AI An 8. Your Team Would Rate It A 3.
Gemineye surveyed 30 people at credit unions and community banks this spring, everyone from CEOs to contact center managers, and asked how important AI adoption is over the next year. The average score came back an 8 out of 10. Nobody scored it below a 4. Leadership has made up its mind.
Then they asked how many AI processes those same people had actually gotten live. Half had one or two running. Thirteen percent had zero. Only 10% had ten or more.
Picture the actual meeting. The C-suite is discussing AI as if it's already a done deal. Down the hall, someone's still trying to get one workflow through a pilot.
The line that stuck with me came from an open-ended question: what's your biggest AI concern or opportunity? 87% answered with a concern. A CFO at an $800 million-asset bank talked about staff getting complacent and leaning on AI instead of their own judgment. A data analyst at a $2 billion bank said the same thing a different way: people trusting outputs they never bothered to check.
That's not a team dragging its feet. That's a team that's seen enough AI go wrong somewhere to know what's at stake, and nobody's given them a reason to trust this particular deployment yet.
Here's what actually builds that trust, based on what's working at the banks ahead of this curve. Start internal. Give the AI a job that supports a person's decision instead of replacing it. Make sure whoever's using it can actually see how it got its answer, not just the answer itself.
Three things to do this week:
Ask your team directly what their biggest AI concern is, not their biggest opportunity. The concern is where the real blocker lives.
Start your next AI deployment somewhere internal-facing and observable, not customer-facing and autonomous.
Put an audit trail requirement in writing before you pilot anything that touches a lending or compliance decision. Examiners will ask. Build the answer now.
FROM MULTIMODAL
Welcoming Shawn Dunn to the Multimodal Advisory Board
Shawn Dunn joins the Multimodal Advisory Board.
Shawn leads Data & Analytics at WSECU. Every agentic AI claim eventually has to survive contact with someone whose job is the data itself, not the demo. Shawn will be one of the people asking where the data actually comes from, how clean it is, and what happens when it isn't.
He's already featured with us once, on our Main Street AI Podcast, talking about the future of AI in financial institutions and how it's shaping the customer experience. Can't wait to show the potential for AI-powered personalization in digital banking, and why strong governance is critical for responsible adoption.
Welcome, Shawn.
Know This Before Your Next Board Meeting
For when someone asks, and you need the number, not the narrative.
Will AI replace jobs at banks?
Not according to the data. Leadership rates AI adoption a priority 8 out of 10, but 87% of surveyed bank and credit union staff named a specific concern rather than an opportunity, with accuracy and data security topping the list. The fear isn't job loss, it's unverified output.
Are community banks profitable in 2026?
Yes. Community bank pretax ROA rose to 1.42% in Q1 2026, up 7 basis points from the prior quarter and 26 basis points year-over-year.
Is community bank net interest margin shrinking?
Yes. NIM fell 6 basis points in Q1 2026 as the yield on earning assets dropped 18 basis points, outpacing the 12-basis-point decline in cost of funds.
🎁 SEND THIS, GET THIS
Know someone still doing this by hand?
Forward this issue to one person on your team who's still buried in manual document review, and we'll send you "The True Cost of Manual Document Processing in Credit Unions." Yes, it's credit union data. But underwriting, compliance, and account-opening paperwork cost the same to process by hand whether you're chartered by the NCUA or the OCC. The benchmarks translate directly.
Takes ten seconds. Beats another Slack message about it.
That's this week
See you next Thursday.
