Innovation is flying fast and furious these days, and many businesses have been very quick to embrace all these new forms of technology. Credit unions have made headway in implementing newer technology, such as AI. Considering the leading-edge technologies, such as quantum computing and synthetic biological intelligence, starting to make an impact, credit union leaders can’t take their eyes off the ball. They will need to continue to learn about and adopt rapidly evolving technologies if they hope to remain relevant.
John Best, Founder and CEO of Best Innovation Group sat down with host Sarah Snell Cooke to discuss the need for credit unions to embrace innovation and continue adopting AI and other technologies.
Disclosure: The transcript below the video is automatically generated
Sarah Cooke 3:19
Hello and welcome everybody. This is the Credit Union Connection. I am your host, Sarah Snell Cooke. I’m here today with a man who needs no introduction, John Best. Welcome.
John Best 3:34
Hey, how are you? I don’t know if, I think I do need an introduction, just because, you know, especially since I shaved some of my beard off, I’m not sure people recognize me.
Sarah Cooke 3:43
Barely recognize you, right? Yeah, and John Best is, started Best Innovation Group years and years and years ago. John, why don’t you give us a little background on yourself and your enterprise?
John Best 3:52
Sure. Yeah, I was lucky enough to start credit unions when I was very young. I was a teacher here in Florida at Hillsborough County Schools, and realized, as much as I love teaching, that was the best job I ever had, that I couldn’t really afford to raise kids on a teacher’s salary. And so, I have been also teaching at HCC at night, which is Hillsborough Community College. I was teaching, believe it or not, like Word Perfect, C Plus Plus, things like that, and had a friend who was coming there to take classes on Novell. Novell, no, there are people who are going to watch this, have no idea what I just said, but and he said, Hey, we’re hiring over at the credit union, and since you’re a teacher, seems like that’d be a good fit, who does technology. And I said, Sure. Didn’t really know what the credit union was, to be honest with you, I just learned about it because I had a job where, or the teacher job, when I first filled out my forms, it said you could get this much every paycheck or this much, and one number was higher than the other. And I thought, this is an IQ testing. If I choose the other one, they’re not going to hire me. So I chose the bigger number. It turned out that was so it could spread out the payments all throughout the year. And so over summer, John got no paychecks, and that was not expected, and you couldn’t change it. It was like, that was not something I could go, Oh, can I switch that back? They’re like, No, but they pointed me at Suncoast. And they said, but you can get skips on your loans and other things, and that’s where I kind of learned about it. So, I went there. I was there for five years, went through a conversion, did a lot of stuff Y2K, went on to GTE Federal Credit Union, where I was very fortunate. I’ve been blessed my whole career to work with incredible credit union luminaries like Bucky Sebastian, Tom Doherty, and even being introduced to people like Ed Callahan and all those folks. And from GTE, I went on the Wescom, where I worked with the great Rob Guilford and Darren Williams, and was there for 12 years. And finally, somewhere around there, I said, Hey, you know, I feel like there is a gap in the credit union space around innovation that I would love to fill because I just enjoy so much being creative around those things, particularly in services for members. So that’s me.
Sarah Cooke 6:07
Awesome. Yeah, no, very, very useful skills, obviously, at this stage of the game, and I love the innovative part, especially you were doing innovations before they were really called innovations, it seems like.
John Best 6:21
You know, I used to just do things. I mean, it was funny, because I remember one of my favorite moments was I used to like to go up to the call center and just hang out, and I like listening. And then, you know, seeing, like, Okay, I’m hearing over and over again, like, what, what is things that are just really becoming, you know, like, Are these people are answering the same question. One of them was reg D. People transfer, just didn’t understand why it wouldn’t transfer. And so back then, since I we wrote our own home banking, I just went home, spent a little while, and on the transfer screen, when you selected the savings account, it would show you how many transfers you had left. And voila, this call stopped once people could see and I put the little link, and I actually linked it right out to the NCUA to explain what ranking was, so they knew it wasn’t us. I love things like that, and I consider those innovations. I don’t think it has to be some big technology gain to get, I mean, it’s kind of a deficiency, but it also is, it was, I think, you know, those are innovations to make the not only that, the members lives better so they don’t have to call and ask these questions like, Why, because they would get some wacky air. It would just say something like, you know, can’t do it, and pass through some some core error that no member would ever understand. These were the early days and, you know. But then also the staff got some relief, you know, and now that, with all those conversations gone, you can have the next conversation, which may or may not be something that’s, that’s like in that vein, but could be the, get the next product, you know, that life situation, that’s, that’s what I love about that sort of approach, and just try to it was, it’s kind of like crack. Once you do it, once you want to do it over and over and over again, and that’s what I love to do, so…
Sarah Cooke 8:00
Are you speaking from experience?
John Best 8:02
On the crack? Yeah, yeah. Really addicted to crack for the Wescom years. Don’t tell Darren. No, I’m just kidding. They probably would believe it. But no, no, no crack. Yeah, no crack in my past.
Sarah Cooke 8:15
I, and I love the innovation for a practical purpose. Innovation is creativity and serving an actual, practical purpose, not just being creative with things like all the damn buttons on my remote control, on my TV. It’s like we’re innovating, but nobody knows how to use it. Anyway…
John Best 8:35
Oh yeah, there’s a lot of buttons. And it’s funny, because over time, people have realized, hey, we don’t need all these buttons. You know, there’s, it’s just interesting how features have evolved. I’m constantly impressed at sort of the the continuing, the continuing narrowing of technology with regard to sort of the human experience and how it connects. And you just keep finding more and more innovation that space. I think it’s really cool.
Sarah Cooke 9:02
Yeah, yeah. Like, we have a Firestick. A lot of people do where you just voice control. We need to be able to do banking that way.
John Best 9:09
Oh, yeah. And they just announced a new Alexa that looks like it’s going to connect to some sort of model that, they’ve realized that Google Home, Alexa, all those products are, I mean, what was the Filene quote, you know, to replace something that exists with something that’s better, right? And I loved my Alexa when I first got it, but now it just seems stupid, like I keep going to talk to it, like it’s chat GPT, or like it’s a LLM, a large language model, but it’s not, so. But they’re, they just announced that, and because we were so early, we were the product in, in the odds called Five, which was Financial Interactive Voice experience, which was using Alexa and that to just control. Because it turned out, you know who loved it, seniors, which, you know, if you think about it, less buttons, just talk to something. I mean, what’s the most natural interface you have? So I just love all of that when it’s in service of of member service, I guess, like you’re saying.
Sarah Cooke 10:08
Yeah, and they don’t have to read if their eyes are really bad and that kind of stuff, yep.
John Best 10:11
Although you wouldn’t want a, like, 12 day, you know, history on your account, read to you. We did this, you know, there are certain things we discovered that the medium wasn’t great for but, you know,
Sarah Cooke 10:23
So what are the, what do you think are the top innovations applicable for credit unions right now?
John Best 10:29
Wow. The first one, obviously, is AI and, and, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but, yeah, Peter Diamandis is who I’ve got the privilege of getting to know a little bit. He says there’s two types of companies in the future, those embrace AI and the gone, right? And I like to use Kodak as that example. And they famously, the guy who invented digital pictures worked for them, and came in the room and said, Look, I got it. And they said, but that’s going to kill all the little photo huts in the parking lot, and we sell film, not, and they didn’t realize they were in the, I always love when somebody says they’re not in the plane business. They’re not in the moving people business. They’re in the experience business on the other side, you know, or, but at Kodak thought they were in the film business, and what they really were, was in the memory business. And they just didn’t know that, you know. So they missed that boat, as BlockBuster did too famously. So I think AI is another disruption that is going to be so strong and so powerful, but it also in this case, we haven’t seen, in my mind, a disruption like this, because it has more than just, hey, the credit union needs to understand this and use it. It is going to disrupt people’s lives, it is going to disrupt, and not the people we thought like, I think we all thought AI was going to take, you know, robots were going to take people’s textile work or whatever, which did happen. We’ve been through this before. But instead, it’s like programmers and marketing and stuff, which, so what does that look like? How does it integrate and all the universal basic income stuff you hear or whatever happens? I don’t know what it is, but I do know for a fact, with what I’ve seen, this stuff is going to displace people, and the world’s also going to go faster. And experiencing it, understanding it, and using it as fast as possible is going to be important. It doesn’t mean go out buy the next shiny thing. It means, start experimenting, start understanding, start leveraging experiential knowledge. That’s the first one. Did you say three?
Sarah Cooke 12:27
I said just top. I didn’t say any specific number.
John Best 12:31
I think the second one, I’m going to go crazy a little bit here. So I’m going to go like way out. I’m not going to talk about like now, so AI is its own category. The next one is synthetic biological intelligence. So the use of, they’ve now, so, they can now create stem cells from, they don’t have to have a fetus to do it, which was always kind of a problem, like, Oh, this is great technology. Can cure cancer with it, but you got to kill a bunch of babies. That just seemed kind of antithetical to the plan. We’re all kind of pro baby. Nobody really wants to murder any babies. So the other option, they finally figured out to take either skin or blood and turn it into stem cells, and those stem cells could be converted to neurons. Now this is very early technology, but what’s happening is, I see AI as a foundational technology that’s making everything else go faster. Every, every engineer is now, I’d say, five times more effective if they’re using AI. Every programmer is five programmers if they’re using AI. So when you do that, it’s economies of scale, and everything speeds up behind it. So this technology has sped up quite a bit. But the idea of introducing neurons, and neurons are very different than silicon, in the sense that, like you or I, we can sense weird things, like, are, we have, you know, a human sense of things. And for fraud, this is going to be really important. So I think the idea that we’re going to have to take a look at this kind of, because we’ve been using neural networks forever, right? Neural Networks have been built into our, built into our credit cards and, and other things to avoid fraud forever. It’s the reason why you try to use your credit card at some gas station and it goes, Yeah, you’ve never been here before, and you shouldn’t be in Tennessee. No, no soup for you, right? But that is quickly because of AI raising the stakes in the, in the fraud business, it’s going to have to be defeated with something that has, you know, equal or better sort of intelligence. And so I think the synthetic biological intelligence piece is up and coming. And I think everything that you can think of is going to be faster than you think, like everything that was predicted to happen, you know, 2050s is probably going to be a little closer to our lifetimes. Like I never thought, personally, I never thought in my lifetime I would see what I’m seeing every day with LLMs. I did not think it was possible. When that, that is a breakthrough, that the magnitude of it, it’s hard to even express, in my opinion, based on my whole life of monitoring this stuff. So that’s the second one is this idea of and by the way, these computers are cool, right? So I, you got to feed them. You got to literally give them nutrients, and they poop. You got to do something with the poop. I’m not kidding. They’re real things, right? And that’s going to lead to a lot of weird stuff too. Like, do they have voting rights? I don’t know. It’s all creepy, but I can tell you right now, for fraud detection, this stuff is going to be through the roof, because it’s capable of determining anomalies out of patterns, which is all neural networking is doing, right? The problem is, is that the patterns become so expansive, the variables that go with it, that it’s hard to sort the, you know, to separate it out, to come up with the viable problems. And then, and then the bad guys know that we do that, and they discern those patterns pretty quickly and change them. We’re going to have to have something, especially with AI that evolves with that. So that’s the second, second one. The third one is just quantum altogether. Quantum computing is going to change us, end to end. First, you know, and by the way, we’re starting to see evidence that, that quantum computing, for those of you that don’t know what that is, so quantum computing is a type of computing. It’s hard to even explain that. Classical computing is sort of linear. It runs, you know, like if you were to if you think of a maze, right? So if, if, if a classical computer goes to solve a maze, it will try to go all the different routes, and basically, it’ll take each one until it figures out where to go, right? So if this one didn’t work, this one didn’t work this way, didn’t work this way, didn’t work. Now, you can multi thread it. You can have multiple computers work on it at once. But what if you could do it all at the same time, like all at once in one thread? That’s what quantum brings to the table. And what it’s really, really, really good at right away is factoring super large prime numbers, which, by the way, all of our encryption is based on. So the day that quantum sort of hits, and it’s called Q-day, it’s going to break a whole lot of encryption at credit unions and everywhere else, so much so that the government has already released documentation. NIST, the infrastructure group, has said these are the you need to start shifting to this encryption because it’s quantum resistant. So that’s one thing quantum will bring is advanced encryption. But you look at people like JP Morgan, who’s invested in AI plus quantum, and to me, what it looks like they’re doing is imagine, if you know, if you think of your entire credit union as a hard drive, right? Remember the old days of defragging a hard drive, before we got all the solid state stuff like, you know, because basically we say, Oh the Word documents will go over here, and we’ll, we’ll make it so that this file, the head, doesn’t have to read back and forth real fast, you know, because over time, it got messed up. Imagine if you could defrag your credit union, meaning that, you know, for instance, this is just a crazy idea, but all payment states, pretty much are what the first or the 15th, you kind of get a choice, right or the end of the month. But what if you could say, well, this member pays on this date based on our cash flow. This member pays on this date. We could give this better, you know, if we, if we, but figuring that out would be impossible for a classical computer to where there’s an advantage and it’d be worth doing. But for a quantum computer, that’s just nothing. That’s just Tuesday. So these things are going to be really huge in the future, and they also bring with them quantum communication, which is really crazy, which is like the large amount of files that you can send, because we think about it, what we’re doing right now is, AI is just we were already producing so much data every day that we couldn’t even, no one could even mentally comprehend of the amount of data, like you couldn’t visualize it. It’s beyond human comprehension. And now AI is greatly, exponentially increased that output between videos, you know, the pictures and images it can do, all the generative AI, all the text, it’s increased that output, which means that, like anything else, the road stick, you know, if the cars are getting bigger, the roads got to be expanded, right? Or if there’s more of them, you got to have more lanes. And so that’s the other piece of quantum is sort of the quantum networking side, which I’ve been talking to a couple of big credit union players about, you know, working on we’ve actually been doing a bunch of work with Filene lately, and we’ve been talking about what it would take to sort of educate everybody in that. Because I’m not suggesting, the whole purpose of, like, what BIG is is not so much to find, like, the two year and the three year innovations, because I think those are pretty obvious. It’s pretty obvious, you got to dig into AI, but I don’t know that they understand the extent and what it’s going to take. But we’re looking for the seven to 10 year place, because those are the things where you going to start preparing the ship today to handle that. If you’re going to have a quantum network, or, for instance, quantum resistant, you know, one of the great examples is, I tell people all the time, and we do this at BIG, we can help you, is conducting, and you and I talked about this at the last, you were on the panel with me, and it was so awesome to see you there out in Phoenix when we did the CEO Roundtable. And we told them, Listen, you need to start looking at conducting a, you know, a crypto inventory to understand all the crypto you have. So that you know, when I say crypto, I don’t mean cryptocurrency. I mean like your VPNs have a cryptology component to it. Your, your networks, your, you know, your website, the little lock that’s on the, on your website, all of that stuff has a cryptology component to it. So do the ATMs, they have cryptology that’s connected to them and data. So what is all that composed of? And is it all quantum resistant? Because the day this hits, all that stuff can just be seen. It’s not even like hard to do. And, you know, it’s an Arms Race right now, which is very interesting. So, yeah, I think those are the three that, if I was, if I was looking long term innovation wise, if I was in, you know, just wanted to look out there and kind of think about of think about how, you know, how will I, how will I succeed in the the 2040s, the 2030s I think that’s the, that’s the foundational layer of understanding. Because, you know, over time, all of these things are going to come to pass, and that includes things like reduction in technology like, you know, with, AR is going to be a big thing, but, but these are the underlying principles in the processing I think it’s going to take to get there.
Sarah Cooke 21:09
And, you know, it’s going to take a while to get there for the credit union’s infrastructure itself, too. And…
John Best 21:12
Yeah, it doesn’t turn on a dime, but it’s not as big as, say, of banks, right? I mean, a bank has a much, when they do something like this, they generally, you know, break it off in the little spaces, but the credit unions, you know, but the thing is, they have to know, and they have to start turning that ship today because of resources and whatnot. Surely…
Sarah Cooke 21:34
Oh, go ahead.
John Best 21:35
Go ahead.
Sarah Cooke 21:36
No, I was gonna say, right now, um, what people know of AI is generally, Chat GPT or, you know, it might help me script the call center or something like that, or respond, um, what are the practical steps that credits can be digging like today to lay that foundation?
John Best 21:54
I think step one is education. I’m actually working on something right now. I’m planning on releasing, sort of a credit union, both executive and staff level, sort of educational website that people could just go and watch a few, go, almost like what we used to have to do for bank secrecy things like that, not only to understand, say that, say the ins and outs of it, but also just to, you need to have a rudimentary understanding of how it works, so that it doesn’t A creep you out and B, so that, if put this way, the really good ideas for AI and what it’s capable of, once people understand what it’s capable of, are not going to come from the people sitting in those exact seats. It’s going to come from the people who are putting fingers to keyboard, those workers, and them having a solid understanding of it is what’s going to bring those efficiencies, and so teaching them, because, the way it usually works is, at credit unions is, we generally start hiring in younger blood, and that younger blood goes, Hey, why are you still doing that? You know, my phone does that, and they help to sort of to move it along. But now the pace is such that I don’t even think that is going to help us keep up. We are going to have to, you know, it’s finally come to a point where innovation is going to have to become a discipline within organizations. It can’t just be sort of a side order of, well, we’ve budgeted 50 grand, we’ll buy some gadgets, see what happens. It’s going to have to be a discipline in the sense of, okay, is this technology something real? Is it something we need to look at? And where do we categorize it in our ops? Where do we categorize it in, you know, services, security, Member Services and, you know, have some sort of event horizon around what these things look like, and whether or not the credit union can, you know, engage in that. I’m not suggesting that everybody wants to go out and hire innovation people. You know, that’s why we exist, because the really cool thing about credit unions is they’re collaborative. So, that’s the one thing that banks don’t have. They’re not going to share innovations amongst each other, but we will. And so that’s the real power for us, our innovation club, which consists of 20 credit unions, you know, the Filene group, those kinds of things, MDC, they bring great value, I think, in different ways, to that concept, but that’s how we evolve together, and it’s always been that way. A lot of great inventions have come out of credit unions that, like first home banking that was on the internet, you know, that was spooling around at First Tech. People don’t realize that, but, you know, a lot of really cool stuff has happened in the credit union space, because we are collaborative, and because I think that we’re, you know, more member oriented.
Sarah Cooke 24:27
Yeah, that definitely that last part, being more in touch with who you’re actually serving. And so you talked about this a bit ago, kind of mentioned it as a side, like some fries or something. But while all these things are AI, large language models, whatever are, are developing for defeating or at least preventing, fraud, the bad guys have it too.
John Best 24:58
Oh, absolutely, they’re enabling it. And not only that, but state actors, which is pretty wild, right?
Sarah Cooke 25:03
Right.
John Best 25:03
Now you’re seeing, and I just saw something today. Let me pull it up here. It was an article where people are being, are being swatted. So that’s where, like, I decided I’m going to be rude to Sarah and call them and, or call the SWAT team. So in this case, they’re being swatted and when they looked into it, they’re using voice generators to do so. That means a voice, that means a an AI with a voice, was able to dupe a 911 operator or, and they believed, using that voice, that that person was in dire trouble, and they went into this guy’s house, they broke into his room, you know, because they think you’re being murdered. And so…
Sarah Cooke 25:50
Right.
John Best 25:51
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, right? Voice cloning, and this is not technology that, that’s that’s the thing I think it’s so hard for people to grasp. You don’t need to run AI, and I did this, I do this demonstration every time I speak at you know, I speak a lot for credit unions and different things. But one of my favorite demonstrations to do live, because I can’t do it on the web, is to take my, my system, and ask it a bunch of questions about things like string theory, stuff that, you know, the average person would know, get all those answers and then go watch this and turn off the internet and just completely disconnect this computer from anything and ask the same question and have it function. And my laptop is not some expensive magic. It’s a Mac Book Pro that’s a couple years I think it’s three years old, but it can still run all of these things locally. And if I can do it, so can anyone, including voice cloning. Voice cloning is not like something only the CIA and NSA, you know, that’s, I think that’s a lot of our thought process. This is technology that is now in the hands of kids. They’ve already had it happen at schools, calling in bomb threats. Voice clone your parents and have them call you out of school. It’s happening because these kids can all play with this stuff and learn it and do it. So we want to hire those ones, if we can turn them from the dark side, because they’re going to be really valuable. So those are the new nerds.
Sarah Cooke 27:10
The new nerds. So with AI and these others kind of overshadowing, one that was a huge buzz word five years ago I would say was, you know, Blockchain. And how is that, what, where is that now? What’s going on?
John Best 27:28
Oh, it’s interesting, because, um, Blockchain is one of those things that I think, nothing’s changed with Blockchain. That’s a weird thing. Nothing’s changed. It’s still the same tech it was five years ago. Nothing has changed. What has changed is people’s perception and understanding of it. It was just such a complex thing to understand that it feels like, and everybody was so hung up on cryptocurrency, so hung up on Bitcoin and those sorts of things that they did not see, sort of the forest for the trees, in the sense that the technology was incredibly valuable, the way it works, it was just a breakthrough of ideas to have the ability to sort of do business with anyone without having to share that information and, and to have it be, you know, a consensus based mechanism, basically a democracy, is sort of in a way that could could deal with that. And I think that as of today, that time has come. But what’s interesting is there is a place for AI in that space. Those two technologies. I like to say, I am not a person that wants to like, I don’t want to create anything. I like to find things. I like to find peanut butter, and I like to find chocolate. And I had to go, Oh, these two things will go good together. AI and blockchain definitely have a really nice capability. If you think about it, one of the challenges of AI, just like a regular person, is they’re only as good as what you teach it, right? So, for example, the big one is DeepSeek, right? We heard all about that DeepSeek, and, you know, the Chinese company that sort of upended the market a couple of months ago. But if you go ask DeepSeek something like, Hey, tell me about Tiananmen Square, because it was created by the Chinese it’s going to go it was a beautiful day. Everyone loved it. A great day for China, right, where that’s not necessarily the historical account of it, but that’s what you’re going to get from that. And there’s a real danger, I think, as we, because more and more people are stopping using Google or doing their research, where they’re just sort of leaning on these things, then the data they’re being trained on, if it’s biased, then it’s going to give you biased information, right? What’s the blockchain? The blockchain is a really cool thing in the sense that it is supposed to be an immutable, immutable ledger of truth, right? So that means that when we put it in transaction sense, we can say this transaction happened, it for sure happened. This money changed hands, or whatever happened. And I can prove that because I have a hundred, billion other systems here that all saw the same thing. It’s almost like a whole bunch of people watching something happen. What I see happening is, is that the the weights of of these products, the weights is kind of the, how you train a large, large language model, as you use the weights of different, you know, neurons or knowledge bases to get that information, but those weights, I think, eventually, will have to be stored in blockchain, because the truth is becoming such a difficult commodity to discern. And so if there’s going to be an arbiter of it, it’s probably going to be something like a blockchain where you know this, this idea is put out there and says, Okay, this is what happened. This is for sure the details of it. Make of it what you will. You can read the details of Tiananmen Square and say this was a bad or a good thing, whatever it is you want to do, but this is the mutable truth of what happened. I think blockchain could fill that gap for a lot of this knowledge, and I think that’s, that’s going to be really valuable. I think also, as time goes on and AI gets better, particularly even in some of the stuff I just talked about that, like running the AI models, or training AI models using the synthetic biologics the brain matter, the neurons, because there’s a power issue there too. There’s, there’s another issue of resource, right? We’re already seeing it. One of the big challenges was that DeepSeek out in, you know, China, they did what they did without access to the latest technology, because we’ve prevented them from getting it. We won’t allow Nvidia to sell them our best stuff. Nvidia being the company that makes the stuff that trains AIs, and they still managed to build one that was as good as what we have. You know, this is the theory using, it’s kind of like, there’s a great line in the first Iron Man where he’s trying to make the same thing that he then he goes, Stark made one of those in the cave with a battery, a car battery or whatever, and that’s kind of what they did. But necessity was the mother of invention, and because they didn’t have access to those things, they streamlined a lot of stuff, and almost everybody that’s read their papers has come to the conclusion to say, Yeah, this, this makes sense, and others are already incorporating it and anthropic and open AI, so imagine that as it scales out into the credit union space, right as power becomes a bigger issue, there’s already cities in this country who are experiencing power issues because Google or Amazon or whoever has opened up some big training facility they’re actually putting in now many nuclear nuclear power’s kind of come back around. So all of these things have scaled that the world is changing now at a faster pace than I’ve ever, ever, ever seen it before, ever. And keeping up with it is not about, it’s a lot of decision making, but it’s also a lot of how flexible can I make my culture, my staff, and, you know, my services to, to engage in this world, and unfortunately, we have a lot of rigidity in all of our systems, and I think that’s something we’re going to have to work out over time.
Sarah Cooke 33:12
And how has that worked out?
John Best 33:16
No, I think there’s a I think there’s a lot of approaches to it, but my main approach is this. I like to think of culture. Culture is the biggest issue, and culture, I look at culture like if you dropped a pebble in the middle of a little puddle, right? This, when you see it raining out, all the little it radiates out all the little waves from it. The strongest ones are closer to the center. Those are always really big, and they get weaker as they go out. I think that in the credit union space, we have strong leadership, you know, you look at the leaders in the credit union space, they’re accessible. It’s a very different model than, say, banks and other things where, like, you know, like, and I think in some of these bigger banks, if you were a loan person, you just want to schedule a meeting with the CEO or something, I’d be like, yeah, that’s not happening. But in the credit union, that’s a reasonable thing. You could get to that level and and make yourself heard, and I think known. It’s a beautiful thing that with, within our culture. But I worry that not, it’s that, not happening enough to empower those people, to reduce the fear, to make sure that they know that you’re on top of it from a regulatory standpoint, that you’re doing all the things you need to do, so that they feel unencumbered, to, to, to deploy these sorts of things, to think that way. And so I think that’s the start. Is it starts with the top. Like, if you’re a CEO of a credit union somewhere, and you haven’t used Chat GPT, shame on you. You got to try it. You need to be out there. You know, if you haven’t bought some, I used to say this about crypto, even as I said, Look, you know, Blockchain is not about crypto, you know, not about the coin. But if you haven’t gone out and bought some bitcoin at this point, after eight years of things, survive, shame on you. So, you know, we have to go out and experience these things and then share it with the staff and share it with the group. I think that’s a big play. And our first instinct, like, what was the first instinct with AI, shut it off. Don’t let it, don’t anybody get access to it. And I sometimes think, well, is that a basis of our hiring? Are we so worried about our employees that they can’t, we can’t trust them to give them a tool. But that doesn’t mean you just give them something carte blanche, but it also doesn’t mean you you can’t, you can’t lock up the candy. They’ll eventually get into it and get the candy. Because they have phones. They don’t even need you to do this. They can download it on their phone and do it themselves. They can take a picture of the screen now and have it do it. I mean, it transcends everything that I’ve ever seen. And it’s just going to get worse, because I can think of more use cases, because you’ve got all these great ingredients that now can it can now do vision. It can do audio. You know, when you put all that stuff together, we’re headed towards, and open AI is headed this way. We’re headed towards you being able to hire a bank of AI agents, of AI people that are, you know, AI agents that you hire from some company and turn them loose on some task. It could be answering the phones. It could be, hey, you know, we’ve been wanting to go through all of our, all, you know, all of our, all the documents in our document imaging repository, and clean that up or something. I mean, it’s just going to be pretty wild how it lays out.
Sarah Cooke 36:13
Yeah, and hopefully we all get, keep up to date on everything, learning about that. I know I don’t use it, use it, but I do play around with it to make sure…
John Best 36:24
You know what, it’s so funny when I first, when I first started in credit unions and Google came out, I remember that. I remember when it happened. After a little while, I, you know, somehow I always wind up in charge, and that’s because I’m the least objectionable person, not because I’m good at anything. Just like, yeah, no one really hates John, let’s make him in charge of something, right? So, but one thing that would happen is a lot of the tech guys would come to me and they’d say, Look, I’m stumped, man, I don’t know where they’re gonna look. And back then I used to help them, but then Google happened. And one of the things I think that I’m pretty good at, that has helped me in my career is, I’m really quick to embrace a tool that I think is valuable. So like, for example, have you seen Perplexity AI?
Sarah Cooke 37:02
No.
John Best 37:02
So, basically Google plus AI. Now Google’s headed that way. You get an AI response, but it’s nothing like how Perplexity does it. Perplexity is a disrupter in the search space. So I would tell you that I use Perplexity now way more than I use Google. I would say, I use it, I don’t know, probably 80/20 over Google. But the thing is, is that after Google came about, when people come to me, Go, John, I’m stuck, and I go, did you Google it? And they go, okay, because I’m going to Google it. And if it shows up on the first three pages, how to fix this, we’re going to have to have a discussion, because I’m not your Google, right? I’ll tell you once, but after, like the, but it’s hard for you know, it’s not easy. I’m broken. I can adopt these things quickly. It’s my ADHD. I just go, oh, change, done. But some folks are very ingrained in what they do. Getting people to understand that there’s this new place that you can go for answers, that is very different than what it was before, it’s because they’ve already I think, I think by and large, our culture understands that you can get answers from the internet, but it’s not that simple. It’s go out to the internet. You’re going to figure out how to ask the question and sort through bazillion links to figure out what’s what. And maybe sometimes that isn’t the most effective way to do things. Maybe there is, but with AI, especially in AI trained on, say, your credit unions operations, your credit union services, then that should probably be the first place you go to ask questions or do what you do, because it’s going to have those answers, and it’s not going to require you to, you know, be on Jeopardy and phrase the answer in the form of a Question or whatever to get the answer out of it. You can be pretty colloquial with it and get what you need out of it. So I think that mindset has got to shift quite a bit.
Sarah Cooke 38:51
Alrighty, sir. So we’ve covered everything, solved credit unions problems, and
John Best 38:55
We just created more. Well, we created more, but in a good way, they’re good problems to have, right, being able to grow. Because if I’ll leave you with this, here’s my final thing, if you’re out there and you’re a CEO, and you’re watching this because you love Sarah, who doesn’t, your job, and I got this from Alan out of TruWest, the guy’s brilliant. He said to me, John, I got to triple the size of this place in the next five years without adding any staff. And I think, I think he crystallized it so well. And if you look at the things it’s going to take to do that, it’s going to take the culture shift. It’s going to take embracing technology in a way we haven’t before. We can’t be as slow as to the take as we’ve been. Fast Following is not a strategy. And most importantly, it’s going to take creativity. And the good news is our industry is chock full of it, because collaboration breeds creativity, so I think we can do it.
Sarah Cooke 39:50
Awesome. Well, I was going to ask you for the final thoughts, but you gave them, so there it is. Thank you so much for joining me today, John, I appreciate it.
John Best 39:58
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.