“Finances are emotional.” Fear, relief, joy, stress. Money carries all of it. And in a world increasingly optimized for speed and convenience, that emotional weight does not disappear just because the interaction moved to a screen. That tension sits at the heart of this conversation on The Credit Union Connection.
When founder/CEO Sarah Snell Cooke sits down with Matt Phipps, Chief Marketing Officer at Agent IQ, the discussion is not framed as AI versus humans; it is more uncomfortable and more relevant to credit unions than that. Digital convenience has become non-negotiable. Members expect it. Younger generations assume it. But the very thing that made credit unions different, the personal relationship with members, is at risk of getting lost along the way.
By the end of the opening exchange, you can feel the question forming: If members want Amazon-level ease but still crave human trust, how do credit unions avoid becoming just another app?
The conversation circles back to a single idea: AI should remove friction from the work that does not require empathy so humans can show up more fully for the work that does. It is about protecting space for real connection.
There is also a refreshing honesty around risk. Hallucinations. Overconfident wrong answers. The quiet danger of staff trusting a system that sounds sure but is not. The talk surfaces why containment, governance and institutional knowledge matter so much. Frontline trust.
What lingers after watching is how often the conversation returns to employees, not just members. Empowered staff. Less frustration. Fewer moments of saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” AI tools improve efficiency as well as dignity at work.
And then there is the Iron Man analogy. It is a little unexpected, a little nerdy and exactly right. Humans do not disappear in this future. They are augmented. The relationship stays human. You are left thinking less about what AI replaces and more about what it gives back.
NOTE: The below AI-generated transcript to the video might not be 100% right, but are any of us really?
Sarah Cooke
Hello. Welcome everyone. I am Sarah Snell Cooke your host here at The Credit Union Connection. I am joined today by Matt Phipps, welcome. Thank you. Thanks and Matt, oh yeah, glad to have you. So Matt is the CMO Chief Marketing Officer at Agent IQ, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization?
Matt Phipps
Well, thanks again for having me, Sarah. Appreciate the opportunity, as you said. Matt Phipps, I oversee kind of the marketing efforts and that we do here at agent IQ, and what we do with Agent IQ really is kind of help extend that, that magic and trust that is built in the branches, the traditional kind of branch relationships. You know, credit unions really built their differentiation on the personal relationships that they have with their members. This is the way that they’re able to be different than traditional, large institutions and having that connection is really valuable, but it becomes more challenging as people move to digital channels more and more, whether that’s their primary or they want that as a as an option, it becomes really challenging. And so what we like to think about ourselves is really helping those credit unions extend kind of that, that real, that relationship, that magic, that trust, that kind of warm embrace everything that they have with their members into digital channels so that we have, you know, AI powered enhancements, everything like that. But really, what we’re doing is extending those human connections that make the, you know, the relationship with the institution, so valuable.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right that cranes have always leveraged relationship banking, and that’s becoming more challenging as banking has evolved. What’s happening right now that’s making it harder to maintain that advantage?
Matt Phipps
Well, you know, I look the obvious one is several years ago, covid forced it, right? So that was a that was a global thing that forced this need to have digital ability to connect. What happened since then is that people actually kind of got used to having that convenience. Maybe I don’t have to drive to the branch to do this, or that was a little bit inconvenient, and now some digital, you know, ability has been given to me. And you know what? That’s actually really helpful and convenient and efficient, and so there’s more and more trend to use that when it is available, and if it isn’t available, even more, you know, importantly, then maybe I’m going to go find some place that does offer that.
Sarah Cooke
Absolutely, I swear, my, I have two Gen Z kids and two One Gen Z in law, one Gen Z, fiancé in law, I guess. And they are all very much about how, if I have to click more than three buttons to make this happen, I’m not doing it.
Matt Phipps
You know, mine’s a little young. I have a an 11 year old son, and you know, I actually he wanted to go to a sports store yesterday and get something, and it was the holiday, and I said, Well, hey, why didn’t you know, see if they’re open? I bet they’re not open. And he looks up on his watch, and he’s like, yeah, they say they’re open. I’m like, Yeah, but you know what, they might not be because that might not be updated. Why don’t you give them a call? That was like terror to him. He would not call, like he wanted to go to that sports store so badly, but he would not call. And, you know, those are just trends in younger generations. And everything else is like, hey, I want to be able to get this, you know, information the way I want it and how I want it. And so I think the expectation, really, that bar starts leveling up. And, you know, the consumer companies like a Netflix or an Amazon or any of these things that make it super convenient to do everything at our fingertips, you know, are setting the stage the bar for every interaction that we have with, you know, in our life. And you know, our financial institution. Is no different.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, absolutely, we’re competing with the hairdresser and the, you know, Bank of America and, you know, the gardener, what have you. So now you mentioned AI can really help credit unions level the playing field, and particularly in productivity, because they often don’t have the resources that a larger institution would have. So what are some of the use cases you’re seeing right now for credit unions implementing AI?
Matt Phipps
Sure, yeah, AI has certainly been, you know, taking over headlines over the last couple of years and but AI has, in different terminology, been around for a while, right? There’s a lot of AI or machine learning and everything that helps, from lending decisions to fraud prevention, everything that’s been there for a long time, but now it’s becoming a little bit more consumer or staff facing friendly and certainly a chat GPT sort of thing made it common for everybody to engage and understand what that’s about, yeah, and so, you know, from a productivity standpoint, there, there’s ways that AI can really help staff be more efficient, right? If they have questions, instead of searching through, you know, documents and policies, or, you know, looking through an internet and trying to search. And, you know, beyond just a search that’s on the internet, you know, how can they find information quickly? And that’s been one of the big challenges is, you know, if, if they are, if credit unions really are focusing on this member relationship, and then they have to stall to be, you know, to search and find information, and maybe that information is outdated or incorrect, and they have to get back that that relationship, that experience, really suffers in that moment. And if that continues to compound, that becomes a challenge. So AI, I’ve always said, is a tool, right? And AI is not a strategy. And a lot of the times when I do, you know, talks or sessions, you know, everybody’s interested in AI, but AI should not be the leading strategy. Your strategy is all your own institution focused. What are your goals, that sort of thing. But AI can be a really powerful tool. And AI in a specific execution. You know, framework can be immensely powerful, certainly with staff to be, you know, more efficient. And so, you know what we’ve done at Agent IQ, we’ve actually created a product that we call Smart Assist, that actually allows internal staff to be able to search policies, documents, information, everything that the institution deems what I want you to be able to look for, and allows that to be searched, analyzed, synthesized, and provided back in a natural language, you know, conversational type way. So it’s, it’s very similar to an experience of a ChatGPT, but more importantly, or most importantly, what it’s safeguarded with institution approved content.
Sarah Cooke
So security, obviously, as you mentioned, security is a concern, you know, and you mentioned, kind of keeping the information within these institutional the credit union’s own system. So what does that mean practically, and why is it so important for credit unions?
Matt Phipps
Well, yeah, I mean, you can think of a damaging experience where, if this was not, if this was open to all publicly available information, that could bring back completely incorrect information, and that’s the last thing you want staff to be able to provide to their members. And so what it means, specifically, from our standpoint, is an institution is able to identify what content they want searchable. So think about it is I’m going to a library, and only the books that my employer wants me to be able to read. Are there at that library? And so now that could be everything from your internal policy and document procedures. It could be your own website, right? We would hope that the website is updated, that information is there so it can be URLs, it can be PDFs, it can be Word docs, it can be any sort of information that is the content that you want. And what’s really crucial is you don’t want that to in the AI terms, hallucinate. You don’t want it to make up something when it doesn’t know or if the information, the answer isn’t there. So if I ask a question and. Information isn’t available. It shouldn’t make it up in a very confident way. That has been the big danger that AI, you know, generative AI, has proven over the course of the last couple of years, when people are using it more and more, is they’re like, Wow, that’s an extremely confident incorrect answer, right? And that’s what you don’t want, right? Because a staff who is asking the question clearly doesn’t know the answer, but if that answer comes back very confidently and it’s incorrect, they may pass it on thinking that it is correct. So the important part is one, that it’s self contained, that it is only the information you want it looking for, and then number two is that it doesn’t hallucinate, that if the answer is not found, then it actually says, so. It says, Hey, I can’t find this for you. Then obviously your next step has to happen.
Sarah Cooke
Right, right? No, that makes perfect sense. And so for credit union, considering AI tools for its staff, what should, where should they be investing? Walk us through, like, what an employee’s day would be.
Matt Phipps
Yeah, I think, you know, again, I’ll go back to my point that AI is a tool. And so I think what credit unions need to be really specific about is, what are they what problem are they trying to solve? And let’s just say efficiency around getting the correct information is a problem that they’re trying to solve. Having a product such as ours will allow them to deploy a internal facing, you know, chat bubble. So say it could be that chat bubble could be on the internet. It could be deployed into something like a Microsoft Teams as a channel so that all staff have the ability to engage in it. Could be deployed in our relationship banking platform that connects members and the staff digitally, but in any of those places that could be deployed so it is easy to access it now, when a credit, when a credit union employee has a has a question, they don’t, you know, they can go in and they can type in natural language so full, you know, hey, what? What are our fees for incoming wires and the product, the AI should go out and search the relevant information, and then it can bring back that information, display it again in natural language answer. And also, you know, very importantly, it can actually cite the source of where that’s found. So now I have that source, there’s the backup, there’s the if I want to actually share that with a member, I can do that and say, here’s the information, and maybe I’m like, okay, great, I got that fee now. Well, how do I actually initiate a wire transfer? And it could go search an internal policy document and actually give the steps right there, so the employee then doesn’t have to go in, open up the manual in the back, look through and so it allows for quick response. It allows for all of that so that the agent, can actually connect with that member, get the information there. And really allows more time to focus on the relationship and keeping that and that experience strong.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, absolutely. And so also, I just want to clarify too. I imagine this is a much more advanced AI than, say, just your average chat, GPT or Claude, whatever you use?
Matt Phipps
What look I wouldn’t want to pump our chest too much and say that is more advanced in any regards. However, what I would say is that it is designed for financial institutions. So whether it’s credit unions, banking institutions, anything like that, you know, SOC two, type two certified, so it has all the security in place, but again, contained around just the institution, improved knowledge, we can actually even deploy it differently for different members of the institution. So let’s just say, you know, management within the credit union has access to different types of materials. Let’s just say it’s HR type materials that can actually be set up so that, you know now Sarah is able to search and find out information that Matt, as a staff agent, would not be able to see if it was different level information for my seniority within the institution. So that’s important. You know, a lot of institutions out there have Microsoft products, right? And there’s Microsoft copilot, the AI, their product built in. The challenge there is that, yes, you may have that AI available to you, but the configuration, the experience, deployment and the functional use of that takes a lot of it, you know, time and. You know, focus to make that work, and then they’ll have to constantly continue to evolve. It as that AI continues to evolve, whereas a product like ours is obviously, again designed for financial institutions, we continue to involve it. So again, I’m not going to compare to a ChatGPT. Experience is just like a ChatGPT, I think OpenAI certainly has some, you know, incredible developers. I think ours does do it, just we focus it around to specific use case and need.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And so you mentioned a second ago how AI can make the employees work with members more human, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that example?
Matt Phipps
Yeah, you know what? We love that, I think at the end of the day, our family there, there’s certain things in in our lives as humans that are really core and need empathy, trust and have a real emotion around it. And certainly, finances are one of those. There’s probably a top three, and you probably could guess what other ones are, but, you know, finances are very personal. They’re very there’s a lot of emotion around there. There’s sometimes fear, there’s sometimes joy, there’s sometimes concern, or, you know, what do I do? And transactional deployment or answers, or impersonal AI can really, you know, sour an experience. It’s like when I’m scared. I need Sarah. I need a human. I need somebody who will understand me and my situation and guide me in the right way that I trust that can only come from a human. There are plenty of things that AI can do from a transactional nature that I don’t need the human empathy. You know, I, you know, I lost my debit card. How do I cancel it? Right? Or how to that, like, I don’t need that, but AI when it can handle that simple, that mundane, help with efficiency so the human can be more present, I think really helps strengthen member relationships, which is what creates that continues to foster that loyalty, that stickiness, and we find that that really ultimately helps credit unions survive and be stronger and grow, because you’re not having to replace attrition of members who are leaving because that experience is better, or those people are better, right? You actually have, you know, a stronger relationship that is harder to break than just a transactional one.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah. And that’s so important people I love that you talked about people in their emotions around money, yeah, we always market with our rates or whatever. It’s the experience, it’s, it’s how you make them feel.
Matt Phipps
It is, I mean, think of back in the day, and again, I know a lot of younger generations don’t, haven’t ever experienced this, but you know, back in the day when you would go into a branch, you know, and there were a couple of tellers available, and one, you know, Sarah, you know, had a line in front of it, but Sarah is the one who I’ve dealt with, who I opened my account with and who you know, has helped me, you know, and James over here was available and said, Come on over. And I’m like, no, no, you know what? I’ll wait until Sarah. It’s because that connection is there. James could probably help me completely fine. But that relationship, that personal connection, and so again, we like we feel that that is so important in a credit union’s you know, you know, you know their strategy of how to be a good business and so we just help extend that into the that same feeling, that same ability to have that connection, into those digital experiences, and let AI really empower staff, even empower and help members to be efficient to get the transactional stuff done, so the real relationships have time and space to flourish.
Sarah Cooke
Yep, love it. So, so if a credit union is implementing these AI tools for staff, what sort of metrics should they be tracking, and what kind of ROI, and when can they expect?
Matt Phipps
It’s a great question. I mean, the obvious one is, if you’re looking at any sort of metrics around the staff, efficiency, performance, but what, what you know it, what also opens up is any sort of CSAT or NPS you know member, you know satisfaction from that experience, but almost more importantly, you have a couple of sides. One is different opportunities to open up new products and services to that member, because you have. Space to talk and communicate and listen to challenges or problems and be able to provide solutions. What’s also really interesting is internal staff satisfaction. We as humans, most humans, really enjoy to do a good job, and when we struggle to provide to do well in our job. It’s not very comforting, right? So if we have tools to empower us to be better, our satisfaction as employees actually goes up. And so we find with you know, deploying tools like this that are institution approved help them be better at their job and serve better to their members, the satisfaction employee retainment goes up and their overall satisfaction goes up. So I think those are kind of the intangibles that people don’t think necessarily right off the gate, but that are really important.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah. It’s so important to retain our good employees too. It’s so demoralizing to be in a system that doesn’t allow you to succeed. I mean, when you’re those people are the ones who are getting yelled at by members. When something done, go right, oh yeah, yeah.
Matt Phipps
And it’s frustrating when you’re trying to do a good job, but like, you can’t get information, or it’s challenging, and you just go, I’m sorry. You feel lousy. You’re the one yes in the front line getting those bullets, and it’s tough,
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, for sure. So what are some near future use cases? Where are credit unions heading with AI?
Matt Phipps
You know, I think credit unions have always been on a cutting edge of technology. They like to do that. They like to offer new experiences and new technologies to their members. They want to be there and do things well. I think AI is such a awesome opportunity to take advantage of things, but I also think it should be strategic and calculated it. I’ll go back to the earlier I said, there should be a strategy. AI is not a strategy, but AI is an excellent tool to help you deploy and execute on your strategy. And so I think narrowing down what problems are you trying to solve, and AI can certainly help in a lot of varieties. There’s internal efficiencies that we can solve using AI. There’s even external member facing. There is, you know, certainly there’s AI that is member facing chat bots, for example. And so those are also other deployment uses of AI that can be really helpful for the experience, for their strategy. What, what we as Agent IQ strongly believe, though, is you should never cut off that connection ability to a human right. Don’t try to put somebody in the death loop of AI right, like we’ve all done on the phone and years past.
Sarah Cooke
Right before the call.
Matt Phipps
So it’s just so I think there’s ways to get into AI in a very contained self, you know, safe and responsible way that isn’t risky. And so that’s where we feel, kind of the internal staff efficiency AI play usually is a great place to start, because it is, you know, internally only, it’s back of the house, but it’s an efficiency play. You can see ROI usually pretty quickly on that from an efficiency standpoint. And then, you know, as you get comfortable with that, you can look at deploying member facing, etc.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah. And so Matt, I always allow my guests to have the final word, final thoughts. What do you want to leave credit union leaders with regarding AI and member relationships?
Matt Phipps
You know, I use this analogy a lot, so anybody who’s seen this before might have or seen me before, might have heard this, but I like to think of AI as a tremendous augment to humans, right? And so it’s it. There’s areas and aspects that it can replace and be very efficient, but I love it’s even more powerful when it augments that human connection. And I go back to anybody who’s a Marvel fan and knows Iron Man. Iron Man has Jarvis, and Jarvis is his AI that helps him be the super, you know, power that he is. He is human, right? He is the human there, and his connection, his wits, his personality and his thinking and everything is drastically important for him being who he is. But the AI helps him be, you know, Iron Man, be super. And I think that’s what AI can do. And I think you know, thinking about that with your, you know, greatest asset being your employees. Empower them to be super.
Sarah Cooke
Yes, yes, absolutely prove it. Prove your employees, your greatest asset. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.
Matt Phipps
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.