By Ray Birch
CHARLESTON, W.Va.—Is ChatGPT the answer for small, short-staffed, overworked credit unions?
According to Linda Bodie, who runs the $55-million Element FCU, it certainly provides a welcomed assist. The credit union is already using the sophisticated technology for correspondence, marketing, strategic planning purposes and more.
Widely discussed at many credit union events, ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that was created by OpenAI. It was introduced free for public use in November of 2022, and has since been widely adopted for both entertaining and serious reasons. A paid subscription service was introduced in February of this year.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, similar AI technologies have also been introduced, including Bard by Google, Bing AI and more.
Bodie and Element FCU have long been one of the most innovative CUs in the country of any asset size—it was the first to develop its own app for electronic check deposits, ahead of the iPhone—and Bodie told CUToday.info ChatGPT is helping her small shop compete better.
‘In Its Infancy’
“This is so new and in its infancy,” Bodie said. “People are even afraid to use it, which is interesting to me. But it will be a game-changer for marketing, for strategic planning, for call center chat…This will just bring much more automated services than we have right now. I think about lending decisioning and lending…”
As CUToday.info frequently reports, the pressure to attract new members, design effective marketing campaigns and develop strong strategic plans has been a challenge for small credit unions looking to stand out in a crowded financial services market. This article is part of an ongoing series in CUToday.info exploring the research, real applications, plans and even fears across the credit union community to respond to and implement the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
“We have developed a policy for using ChatGPT with our credit union,” Bodie explained. “We have encouraged our staff to use it, they use it often for creating emails, to make them better, to make sure we're including the right information. It is simply helping staff write better,” Bodie said.
Makes it ‘Sound Better’
Bodie said ChatGPT is making the credit union’s overall content better.
“It will take whatever you've input and make it sound better, use proper grammar and probably make it more easily readable for your audience and more professional,” she said. “Not all of our staff are skilled at writing, and this has helped elevate what we do. Over the years people’s attention to proper grammar and such has slipped, and ChatGPT fixes that. Our staff loves it—they can just speak what they want to write and they get something back that’s very good.”
The appeal of ChatGPT is evident by the growing number of news reports on the technology that achieved more than 100 million users by January 2023, two months after its initial launch, a statistic that makes ChatGPT one of the fastest-growing consumer applications.
Being Wary
But all that popularity doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns. Element FCU said it has developed a ChatGPT policy that includes a warning to staff to not use proprietary information with the online tool.
“This is a public tool, and it learns from its input,” she reminded.
Linda Bodie
Experts have also pointed to an inherent risk of data exposure while using a third-party service, with ChatGPT being no exception. In March 2023, a ChatGPT bug was discovered to have exposed titles, the first message of new conversations and payment information from ChatGPT Plus users.
A report in Mashable states: “Whether you're using ChatGPT in your personal life or to boost work productivity, consider this your friendly reminder to think twice about what you share with ChatGPT.”
In addition, other experts have also pointed to ChatGPT’s potential for biased or inaccurate information, and that due to the wide range of data it has been trained on, the tool might inadvertently generate responses that contain false information or reflect existing biases within the data.
About More Than Correspondence
Bodie said Element uses ChatGPT for much more than correspondence.
“I’ve used the tool to create our strategic action plans. And, I have written computer code with it—code to support our website,” she said. “Even when I just get stuck on something I have been trying to create, such as a presentation, ChatGPT gets me unstuck. I've created presentations and basically anything you can think of to help make things sound better and to get ideas. It's amazing.”
Bodie reminded the credit union edits whatever content ChatGPT gives them.
“Of course, you still have to change some of what it writes, but not that much,” Bodie explained.
The Plan for Planning
Element FCU has also been using ChatGPT for planning purposes.
“Say we are implementing this new program,” Bodie explained. “I put in as much information as I have about the initiative as I can and then I say, ‘Give me a three-year strategic business plan.’ ChatGPT will create it and then I can take that model, massage it, and then tell ChatGPT to make longer make or shorter, add whatever parameters I want.
“Then I can extract that and make my internal changes to what it has created, because you're not going to use everything it produces. It's going to give you great information to use, and then you can add stuff, delete stuff and change stuff so that it sounds just like what you would want.”
When used for planning purposes, Bodie said ChatGPT is more than just a time saver for a CEO of a small credit union who wears many hats.
“It's great for ideas,” she said. “I don't know how many times I have put in information and it comes back with things that I never even thought of. It’s online brainstorming. For example, I ask it to create a marketing plan and ChatGPT tells you that I should be going to the homeowners association and presenting this plan to the residents. It just brings up things that you don't think of, as options for doing whatever it is that you want to do.”
Bodie said the tool is also excellent for generating marketing ideas and concepts.
“Another example: I have given ChatGPT as much information as I could on a new promotion we were planning and said give me the name for the promotion, give me the details of what I need to do…,” Bodie said. “It gives me 30 different names for the promo in seconds along with all of the details. I get that done and move on to other things I need to do. It’s very good information and I did not have to sit around a table for hours with the team brainstorming.”
Being Aware of Limitations
Bodie agreed with experts who have stated that it is crucial to approach the use of ChatGPT and similar AI systems with a critical mindset, being aware of its limitations and potential risks, while also leveraging its benefits for specific tasks.
“I think there's always concerns. We tell people, obviously, don’t put in any personal information, be as ‘non-proprietary’ with ChatGPT as possible. We are definitely following the rules to make sure that we're being safe,” she said.
Finally—and fittingly—the sophisticated code underlying ChatGPT has been very good at creating additional code for Elements FCU.
“For example, if I need code to create a table in a website I tell ChatGPT to create HTML language for a table that has four columns and 10 rows, to color of the table rows gray and blue, and it needs to be 800 by 600 pixels; whatever detail you want to tell it,” Bodie said. “Then it will write the code and you can copy and paste that code into your HTML document. Done. There you have it.”
The Fear and the Promise
For all the promise of the technology, there has also been fear it will eliminate jobs. Indeed, during Co-op’s THINK conference earlier this year, one speaker showed a screen grab of the Google search page after the word “Will…” was typed into the search bar. Google immediately populated the rest of the search with sentence “AI cost me my job?”
ChatGPT, acknowledged Bodie, will do away with some people’s roles, but at the same time create demand for new ones. She believes it will drive roles for people who have the skill to best work with AI.
“We will need more analytical and critical thinkers,” she said.
Could it someday replace a CEO?
“I don’t think so. Just like AI can’t ever replace doctors,” she concluded. “But it will be a great resource for CEOs, especially for those who lead smaller credit unions.”
More in this series: