The Briefing · Issue 1 · May 1, 2026 · 4 min read
Who's Really Using AI
The conference version of AI and the desk version are two different stories. Here's the one nobody puts on a slide.
I spend a lot of time in front of rooms full of bankers. And I can tell you the AI conversation at the podium sounds nothing like the AI conversation happening at people’s desks.
AI is a strategy. A committee, a vendor evaluation, a line item, a transformation. It's big.
AI is a Tuesday. Someone's cleaning up a loan memo before committee. Marketing kept the two subject lines that didn't sound like a robot wrote them. An exec turned three rambling voice notes into a clean board summary before the coffee was cold.
That second story is the real one. And almost nobody is telling it.
The hype has a blind spot
Here’s what I’ve noticed. The louder a bank talks about its AI strategy, the less likely its people are to actually be using AI day to day. That sounds backwards. It isn’t.
Big strategy conversations tend to freeze people. If AI is a massive enterprise initiative with a steering committee, then it isn’t my job today, it’s the committee’s job someday. So nobody touches it. Meanwhile the bank down the road never gave a speech about it, and half their lenders are already using it to draft, summarize, and prep.
The banks pulling ahead right now aren't the ones with the best AI decks. They're the ones whose people quietly built AI into their daily work while everyone else was still forming a task force.
So who’s actually using it
When I actually ask, room by room, the honest hands go up in the same spots almost every time.
Turn messy notes into a first-draft memo, so they spend their time judging the deal instead of formatting the write-up.
Gets unstuck. Not publishing a robot's work, but generating ten angles fast and choosing the good one.
Turn a pile of thoughts into something readable. Dictation plus AI is the quiet exec superpower right now, and most people using it aren't advertising it.
Summarize long documents and draft the boring but necessary first pass.
Notice the pattern. None of this is science fiction. It’s everyday work, done faster, by regular people who never asked permission to become an “AI user.”
But how does this apply to my bank
Here’s the part I actually care about, because it’s where most banks get stuck.
You don't need an AI strategy to get value from AI. You need permission and a nudge.
The value isn’t waiting on the other side of a two-year roadmap. It’s sitting in the everyday tasks your people already do, if you let them use the tool. Three things get a community bank moving faster than any committee.
Name the everyday use cases out loud
Give your people a short, plain list of what this is good for at your bank. Drafting a memo. Summarizing a policy. Cleaning up an email. Ten ways to say the same thing. When people see permission and examples, they start.
Kill the "everyone's output will be the same" fear
It's the number one thing I hear from execs, and it's simply not true. Ask any AI tool for ten different ways to write a sentence and you'll get ten. Turn up its temperature and it gets more creative on command. These aren't magic, they're modifiers on your instructions, the same as telling it to "act as" someone. Your people's judgment is still the differentiator. The tool just gets them to the starting line faster.
Make it safe to be a beginner
The people getting value aren't the most technical. They're the ones who felt allowed to try a small thing, saw it work, and did it again tomorrow.
That’s the whole game right now. Not a moonshot. A hundred small, quiet wins from people who were simply told it was okay to use the thing.
The banks who figure this out won’t announce it. You’ll just notice, a year from now, that their people got faster and yours didn’t. The window to be early is still open. It won’t be for long.
If you want, I’ll build you the one-page “everyday AI” list your team can actually use. That’s the nudge that starts it.
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Worth reading
Ben