As more banks and credit unions deploy artificial intelligence tools to perform tasks once done by employees, they may soon have to include them in their workforce strategy planning as well. That could involve hiring new leaders who can bring human resources and information technology professionals together with key members of the C-suite to make future hiring decisions with AI in mind.
Some executives like Darren Davis, president of small business speciality lending at Colony Bank, a subsidiary of $3.6 billion Colony Bankcorp, based in Fitzgerald, Georgia, already feel like the work being done by AI could impact future hiring decisions. Davis recently deployed an agentic AI tool to incorporate new U.S. Small Business Administration requirements for small loan underwriting. He turned to a solution from Lama AI, a company that specializes in providing AI-native lending tools.
“We had gotten that process down to about seven to 10 business days to close,” Davis says. “And with the new requirements, and the system we were on, we were afraid that was going to go to three weeks. We’ve actually gotten back down to where we were before, seven to 10 business days. And I think as we improve, we’ll get quicker. For example, we had 95 manual tasks that we were doing, and we dropped that down to 32.”
Davis says such agentic AI tools could stem the need to add more employees in the future. “Our plan isn’t to scale back as we add the AI, or get rid of people,” he says. “It’s set us up for growth, so we can get larger with the same group that we have.”
The lending team at $14.4 billion ConnectOne Bancorp, based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, is also using AI tools to improve efficiencies. Chairman and CEO Frank Sorrentino is deploying an agentic AI tool from software provider nCino to handle tax return spreading, financial analysis, commercial relationship reviews and more. “I estimate at least 50% of our lending team’s efforts are in administrative tasks,” he says. “We can reduce those from 20 minutes to seconds. It’s an enormous amount of time.”
But Sorrentino doesn’t see a future where AI limits ConnectOne Bank’s future hiring. “Every technological improvement that we’ve brought to ConnectOne has resulted in more people working for the company in a more efficient manner and helping to drive the growth of the organization,” he says. “We have never had a year where we’ve had fewer people than the year before. So, my short answer is — absolutely not.”
Managing an AI Workforce
Whether financial institutions predict hiring to remain stable or grow due to AI, it will likely impact their workforce development planning either way. A May 2026 report from nCino found that 89% of senior bank and credit union executives surveyed believe their organization will be using a combination of humans and Al agents in the next five years.
Sorrentino says that new reality is changing the entire concept of workforce engineering. “What does IT mean? What does technology mean? What is workforce? All these things are changing dynamically, and I think they need to be thought of in very, very different ways,” he says.
Mika Moser, who is founder and CEO of a firm called At C Level, provides talent and leadership consulting to financial institutions. She says there is no getting around the fact that AI is now a part of the workforce at every business that uses it. “It’s evolving to be more than just software. It’s actually doing work and making recommendations, making decisions and taking action on our own behalf,” she says. Moser thinks banks should be thinking about how they govern people who use AI. “Why are we not having that conversation?”
Cory Kronheim, founder and CEO of the AI-advisory and enablement firm SM Advisors, is actively working to encourage that conversation. Kronheim calls on the financial institutions he advises to embrace a new concept — the integrated workforce department. He says most institutions have a triangle of departments that all touch on AI right now, including IT, HR and various members of the C-suite, but none have the full perspective on it.
“You need somebody that’s going to be sitting in the middle of that triangle who has a worldly view of what we want to accomplish with the organization, has a worldly view of where AI is impacting the organization and has a worldly view of how it’s impacting our people,” Kronheim says.
Moser says it is a concept banks and credit unions are going to have to adapt to in one form or another as they continue to build out their AI use cases. “I think we’re going to have to be more intentional about how we define its responsibilities,” she says. “And how do we know where its boundaries are? And how do we hold it accountable? And to me, that’s kind of a workforce conversation, not a technology conversation.”
A Tough Role To Fill
C-suite executives and their leadership teams are already reskilling employees as AI performs more of the work they used to do. Davis says that is happening in real time at Colony Bank. “We have a loan assistant that spent a lot of time putting together the documents we need to review. Well, Lama [AI] is going to do that for us,” he says. “Eventually that task will be [taken] away from them so they can spend more time with customer-facing and relationship-type work than the busy work of administrative functions.”
But reskilling a current employee to move into the role of what Kronheim calls a chief integrated workforce officer might not be realistic. It won’t be easy to hire the role from outside either, he admits.
“I can’t go to LinkedIn and search for whatever this role’s title needs to be. And so, typically it’s a matter of looking for skills, not looking for a title,” he says. “That person has to have certain qualities. They need to be influential in the organization. They need to be technically savvy. They need to understand our corporate strategy. They need to have the voice of our CEO or the ear of our CEO. And they need to be somebody that the organization looks to for guidance, meaning our frontline people or our end user respect the overall approach that this person has taken. It’s a very difficult role to fill.”
While daunting, Kronheim says financial institutions can start that process by looking at their current corporate strategy, and determining how AI can impact and support it. “Then they take a step back and they say, ‘Who in our company is necessary to own that overview and that strategy specific to AI?’” he says. “Those are going to help you answer [three] questions, which are, ‘What do I want to do with AI? Where do I go with it? How do I need to govern it?’”
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