Choosing Where to Stay Human

Your whole pitch is the same true thing: we know your name, we answer the phone, we make the call locally. That’s the moat. It’s how a $900 million bank holds its own against one a hundred times its size.

Which makes AI different for you than for almost anyone.

The question isn't just what you can automate. It's what you should never hand over, no matter how good the tool gets.

Get that right and AI sharpens your human edge. Get it wrong and you automate away the exact thing that made people choose you.

Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor behind the newsletter One Useful Thing, framed this well in a recent piece, “Choosing to Stay Human,” and full credit to him: staying human means making a conscious choice about when and how to use AI. Not reflexive dependence. Not reflexive avoidance. His warning is that the defaults are being set right now, mostly without a plan, and once your people build habits around them, they’re hard to reverse.

But how does this apply to my bank

So here’s the exercise I’d run with your own team. Before you automate anything, name your human moments out loud. The handful of interactions that are the moat: the workout call on a struggling loan, the small business owner who needs a real judgment call, the customer who walks in after a hard year. Those are the ones you protect on purpose. Then point AI at everything around them, the prep, the paperwork, the first draft, so your people have more time and attention for the moments that actually earn loyalty.

The mistake was never using AI. The mistake is letting the default decide for you which moments stay human.

Make that call deliberately, while you still can. That’s the whole opportunity for a community bank: not to automate like the big guys, but to use AI to protect the human edge they can’t buy.

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Worth reading

One more thing

Summer is finally here, and I’m counting down to Fete de Marquette, four days of music, food, and no laptops just up the road. It’s a good reminder that the human parts of life, and of work, are the parts worth protecting.

Hope you get a stretch like that this month too.

Ben