A three-question filter I run on every AI vendor pitch in the first thirty minutes. Architecture, customer usage, governance. If a vendor cannot answer them in plain English, the conversation is over.
I ran the same prompt through five AI tools, asking each to recommend a credit union. The institutions named were not the ones with the largest marketing budgets. Three patterns and a starting playbook.
If I were still in the marketing seat at a mid-size credit union or community bank, here are the three projects I would build this quarter. And the three I would not.
TL;DR Customer acquisition cost is the metric every marketing leader has been judged on for the last fifteen years. It is also a metric that is getting harder to compute every quarter, for reasons that have nothing to do with the marketing team’s competence. Three different metrics are starting to take over the CAC conversation
TL;DR I have been in some version of the same conversation about AI inside credit unions for the last twelve months. The conversation starts well. Somewhere in the middle, one of three objections shows up. The conversation stops moving forward. Below are the three objections, why each of them is reasonable, and the framing I
Editor’s note (July 2026): the numbers in this post reflect the dataset at the time it was written. The living version, updated as the dataset grows, is at AI Visibility in Financial Services: Benchmarks. TL;DR I have now audited 404 websites for AI visibility across 176 unique domains, with 67 of those audits running at
Why quarterly CI decks are being replaced by always-on agents, and how financial institutions can build autonomous competitive intelligence systems.
When consumer AI agents act on behalf of members, banks and credit unions will need to rethink who the customer is and how to serve them.
AI visibility readiness was round one. Agentic readiness is round two. A six-dimension scoring framework for the next gap financial institutions face.
Three practical, low-risk agentic AI pilots that credit unions and community banks should run this year, and the results to expect.