Finance chiefs at regional banks are inheriting transformation playbooks written inside far larger institutions, and KeyBank National Association is one of the places those playbooks were drawn up. 

What travels between a national bank and a regional lender is less the technology budget than the discipline of deciding which AI projects deserve to scale. At Northwest Bancshares Inc., that discipline arrived with a finance leader who had already run one overhaul elsewhere. Workiva Inc., whose Amplify event put AI governance at the center of its agenda, is among the software partners carried over from KeyBank, according to Doug Schosser (pictured), chief financial officer of Northwest Bancshares.

“After we spent some time sort of learning how you could get information delivered so much more efficiently and so much more connected with operational data through using some other software, I decided to bring that experience over to Northwest,” Schosser said. “It was interesting because the size and scale of the two firms are very different.”

Schosser spoke with theCUBE’s Krista Case, principal analyst and practice lead for cyber resilience and security, and co-host Alison Kosik at Amplify, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Northwest Bancshares is applying lessons from KeyBank to guide its finance transformation and responsible AI adoption. (* Disclosure below.)

Lessons from KeyBank land inside a regional finance team

Schosser weighs AI proposals against three tests: customer impact, internal efficiency and risk reduction. Workiva has pushed further into the same territory, launching specialized AI agents and an intelligence layer for high-stakes reporting in July. Oversight has not kept pace with the speed of the tools, he explained.

“We think about hiring a junior analyst and having a lot of oversight over that person early on in their job,” Schosser said. “For whatever reason, we don’t think about technology that way, but I’m thinking they are doing similar tasks with similar data.”

Accurate, curated data comes first, and Schosser described the work as a large orchestration problem spanning finance, information technology and the lines of business. The same caution governs which systems survive the shift, he noted.

“Just layering on a new tool on top of bad process is never a particularly good answer,” he said. “It may just lead you to automating something that’s not very efficient or that’s creating friction on its own.”

The reporting platform Schosser carried from KeyBank holds years of document history, which he sees as raw material for training agents to absorb routine roll-forward tasks. The payoff, in his view, is measured in where judgment gets applied.

“I think technology amplifies your ability to do things more quickly,” he said. “That way you can get your human workforce to really do what they’re best at, which is probably still detailed explanations and helping connect the dots.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Amplify:

(* Disclosure: Workiva sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Workiva nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE