Senior executive vice president and chief digital officer at U.S. Bank Dominic Venturo says that you have to think about what hasn’t happened yet, otherwise you’ll spend a mountain of money implementing new systems that won’t connect to technology to come. Now, there’s so much talk about artificial intelligence, especially GenAI, that it might seem bank innovation will hang entirely on AI going forward. GenAI holds center stage right now because it’s new, says Venturo. Also, the excitement level stays high because large language models and related tech made it possible to utilize forms of AI that have been available to banks for years, but that could only be accessed with the talents of data engineers and other specialists beforehand. “The sea change was the human interface, and the simplicity of use and not needing to know all those specialized things because you could use a finely tuned large language model and find use cases for it,” says Venturo. “So, it has the capability to scale pretty rapidly.” But GenAI won’t be the whole game. Venturo says banking will tap many other enabling technologies. Application programming interfaces (APIs), migration of more and more into the cloud, and modern processing architecture will all have a part. “There’s a ton of capabilities that don’t require AI within those spaces to be able to do it,” says Venturo. Not to take away from AI’s importance. Venturo recently decided to spin AI out of his bank’s Innovation Group. AI had been one of multiple leading-edge technologies based there, but Venturo saw that things had changed. The CoE is supported by the establishment of an enterprise data product office. The AI center is one of several areas in the bank that the data office will serve. It will also dovetail with digital experience development and digital marketing.