BOSTON–Sharing insights that in many ways are counter to everything credit unions are often told, one expert encouraged CUs to embrace “friction,” said CUs need to consider going from “100 to zero,” suggested leaders ask themselves how they might get themselves fired, and observed that while AI is powerful, had the Wright Brothers had access to the technology they probably would have never flown.
All of that and much more was shared by Shawn Kanungo, an innovation strategist who also challenged his own authority to speak to an audience at the World Credit Union Conference here.
As an example of how individuals and companies can believe they know everything right up until they don’t, Kanungo shared how he began his career at a newspaper company in Singapore where he was charged with advising the company on the future of the industry. His boss told him as a media strategist his job was to assemble the best practices from the very best newspapers around the world, and to combine that with what people said they wanted in a newspaper, and from that he would be able to provide recommendations and strategy.
But none of that offered any insights into the huge disruption that lay ahead.
“We never thought about any of the disruptors coming, like social media,” Kanungo said. “I will never make the same mistake again, which is to get really romantic about what’s happening inside an industry. Instead, I now look at what are the disruptors at a macro level interrupting every single organization.”
As Kanungo would go on to make clear, there is much that credit unions should not be romanticizing.
A ‘Beautiful Question’
My job is to ask this beautiful question: Are you willing to disrupt yourselves,” he asked. “To get bold answers, you have to ask bold questions.”
Question One: Is AI the next Big Disruptor?
Kanungo noted that research and consulting firm Gartner believes artificial intelligence is being overhyped. He disagrees. Although as he would make clear later, he also believes there is one thing that remains more powerful than AI.
“We haven't even started to figure out all the possibilities and opportunities in this particular space,” said Kanungo. “We are entering into a technological revolution like you saw with the Internet. The world wide web helped democratize knowledge, but what AI is doing is actually democratizing work. I call it the ‘world wide work,’ because for the first time in our human history these machines can actually get things done for us.”
Creating an Example
As an example of the power of AI and large language models, Kanungo showed his audience an image of the website from the Kenyan Police Sacco (credit union), which offers loan calculator that was quite simple in appearance. He then showed an image of that same calculator after he provided some prompts to the LLM Claude 3.5, which created a significantly more attractive version of the calculator.
His instructions to Claude 3.5? “Please turn this loan calculator into an interactive website,” Kanungo said. “To me the number-one use case for gen AI is around data analytics capabilities.”
He provided several other examples of using ChatGPT to examine a massive Xcel loan file with the prompt, “Pretend you're a world class data scientist working for a credit union. Analyze this data of loan defaults and provide insights with bar charts, visualizations and interactive graphs to make sense of this data.”
As he demonstrated, ChatGPT not only did that, it also identified some anomalies.
“The implication is that anything that is digital today will be replicated by an AI, an app, a website,” said Kanungo. “What we are starting to do is reimagine how we are looking at work. We are reimagining the processes inside our credit unions.”
Some 10-Year-Olds & M&Ms
Kanungo jokingly advised his audience to grab a bunch of 10-year-olds and give them some M&Ms and instruct them to begin creating websites using the AI tools available.
“We are starting to rewire how we look at work…You don't have to start with a blank slate anymore---the AI can be the input to what you do. I don't believe it should be the output,” Kanungo said. “You can start with 100 different websites, you can start with 100 different fraud analyses, you can start with 100 different apps or images or campaigns and that becomes your starting point. Then you go through your creative process and you get a final deliverable. The end is now the beginning. My belief is that there's going to be two types of leaders in the future. There's going to be leaders who leverage this technology and there are going to be leaders who are irrelevant.”
The Question Everyone Asks
Kanungo said there is one question he gets almost more than any other: what will AI mean for children and the future of jobs?
He noted that over the last 10 to 15 years every speaker like himself who took to the stage at a credit union conference or any other event would say it is vital children learn computer science and coding.
“But it's almost exactly the opposite,” said Kanunga. “It is our job to create computing technologies so that nobody has to program, so that the programming language is human. We are starting to reimagine everything that we know about work.”
Bucking Parents’ Advice
Growing up the son of Indian immigrants in Canada, Kanunga said his parents emphasized education and a career such as engineering, law, medicine or accounting, jobs that would always be “safe.”
“I've been trying to push back against this throughout my entire life,” Kanunga said. “Throughout my life I’ve heard this one line that I believe has destroyed an entire generation globally: What will people say? This has destroyed an entire generation of people and kept them from doing something creative or bold.”
He recalled the quote that appeared with his picture in high school, which read, “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
“My parents told me knowledge is power. I believed it for my entire life up until two years ago. Today, I don’t believe it anymore. Not when every single person on the planet has an AI copilot beside them. To me, what is power today is people who can innovate, people who are bold. A knowledge job was the most valuable job in the world. Today, the most valuable job is to be a value creator. The definition of innovations is to create value in a new way…To me the most disruptive entity in the world is the individual, because we can do way more with way less.”
Not All Roses
Kanunga acknowledged there are downsides to AI that are potentially frightening.
“The deepest implication of AI today is that it marks the end of trust. When you can’t tell the difference between AI and what is real, what can you trust at the end of the day?”
Question: In a World of Radical Change, What Has Never Changed?
Despite all the talk of change, in the 200,000 years of human history, there are things that have never changed, said Kanunga, as outlined in the slides, below.
“The difficulty in addressing these things becomes more difficult every year. The expectations of your members are becoming more difficult,” he told the meeting. “There are baseline expectations of everyone that keep rising. We have turned everything into a transaction and this is going to get even worse. We are entering into what I call the addiction economy. We have turned everything into its most efficient form. What’s happening here is we suck out the meat, the context, and at the end of the day we suck out the trust?”
The F Word
Kanunga believes there is an F-word every credit union should embrace, even if it runs counter to what has become almost a Biblical truth in credit unions.
“We need to bring the F word back: friction,” he argued. “I believe we need more friction. All these big tech companies have sold us a story in which they have removed the friction and they told us this was good. Facebook removed the friction of finding connections. Netflix removed the friction of finding entertainment. But at the same time they have removed the soul. But credit unions are not in the business of a frictionless experience, you are in the business of relationships and trust and community. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in digital. But don’t forget the way you get valued by your members is through friction. When you make things more meaningful and memorable and awe-inspiring and surprising, that’s about friction, that’s about humanity at the end of the day.
“Your brand is not your logo or colors, it’s the story that is embedded in the hearts and minds and souls of your members,” Kanunga continued. “Today, the experience is the brand.”
Credit Unions Need a New Strategy
Kanunga, who said he “can smell when a strategy is not going to work,” believes credit unions need to freshen theirs.
“Strategy is an imaginary theory that has to set people on fire,” Kanunga said. “It’s the only way to get through the uncertainty. Strategy isn’t what’s on a piece of paper. Strategy without energy is a PowerPoint.”
According to Kanunga, credit unions need to be asking:
- What is our bold ambition
- How are we remarkable different
- How do we make it personal
- Where is the world going?
Get Your CU Freak On
“Strategy is about how do we become unique, how do we become a freak? This is what every company is asking today: How do we go from good to remarkable? I know this sounds blasphemous, but I believe the most important skill of the future is to ignore the AI, to ignore the best data we’ve ever collected, to ignore the collective intelligence of billions of people, because it’s all based on the past.”
He offered as an example the Wright Brothers turning to ChatGPT and using the prompt, “We are bicycle shop owners and want to be a flying machine,” it would have reviewed all available data and concluded flight is “impossible.”
“AI is the second most powerful force ever created,” said Kanunga. “And the first is our ability to ignore it.”
‘Haunting Words’
Suggesting the most haunting words in business are “We used to be the best,” Kanunga said many companies are trying to figure out how to be “remarkable again.”
“Good leaders optimize the past and are only focused on efficiency. Remarkable leaders create the future. They are focused on innovation.”
The Last Question: Are you Willing to Disrupt Yourself?
Kanunga said he’s worked with numerous companies in helping them to go from zero to 100, But where the real challenge lies is in intentionally going from 100 to zero.
“There is an ugly word: status,” he said. “Status is wrapped around everything we do. It’s our identity at the end of the day. If you want to disrupt yourself, you have to let go of status.”
Zero Principle Thinking
Kanunga offered this challenge to credit unions: “If you were to start your CU today or your department today, how would you do it?
While he said it’s an almost impossible question to ask, related questions include:
- What would you eliminate?
- What would you automate?
- What would create more humanity?
And there’s another tough question, too.
“I ask myself, how do I try to get myself fired?” he said. “How do I make a small bet today to change my trajectory and my organization’s trajectory? I ask this question because this is the whole point of disruption. How do I try to get myself fired before someone fires me? Boldness is built by deliberately exposing yourself to challenges. It’s not about thinking, it’s about acting.”
But Why Listen to Me?
All of that said, Kanunga admitted to his audience he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“The hypocrisy of this entire presentation is this: I was hired to talk about the future but I don’t know much about the future. The most dangerous person is the room is the one who is most afraid yet bold enough to move forward.”