COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. / APPLE VALLEY, Minn. – Reflective of the rapid shift artificial intelligence is creating in the world, one credit union has named its first-ever chief AI and innovation officer—and he’s sharing his journey to the role and advice for other CU leaders as they respond to AI.
As the CU Daily reported here, Wings Credit Union has named Scott Kuhlman to the newly created role, where WCU said he will lead the credit union’s strategy for artificial intelligence (AI) and enterprise innovation, with a focus on delivering meaningful value for members and employees. The aim is to improve efficiency, enhance decision-making, and support team members in creating more capacity for high-impact work, according to the credit union.
Below, Kuhlman, who previously served as Wings’ chief capital officer and deputy chief financial officer and who the credit union said was selected for the new leadership opportunity in part because of his experience with AI-enabled scenario modeling and business process knowledge, shares details on the new role, as well as advice for other credit unions.
The CU Daily: Tell us more about this position and why it was created?
Kuhlman: This was created for a couple of reasons. First, we believe AI can provide efficiencies and scale to provide better value to our members. Second, there is a lot of interest in the industry and internally in AI so we wanted a centralized spot to roll this out. So many AI programs provide minimal ROI and become an expense burden.
Our goal is to harness the energy, excitement, and expertise of our team members and focus it on our cooperative’s priorities, but most of all, we felt that centralized governance also gives us the best way to provide a strong control framework.
The CU Daily: Your background is not in tech, but Wings credited your experience in AI-enabled scenario modeling, business process knowledge and a “builder’s mindset” for moving you into this role. So, how have you used AI and could you walk other credit unions through your learning journey?
Kuhlman: I get this a lot, but if you look across some of the largest banks, they put business line leaders in charge of their AI programs. I have 25 years of deep experience at heavily regulated institutions in accounting, audit, commercial lending, deposit strategy, pricing, liquidity, interest rate risk, capital markets, stress testing, forecasting, and strategic balance sheet planning. I understand the business of our industry and how it works at a detailed level.
This is important because we’re approaching AI not necessarily as a “tech” focus, but as business support and something that will eventually touch every business process in the credit union. Also, we need to make sure that this is done in a well-controlled manner that provides efficiency and return to our members.
I’m sure there is no stereotypical journey for this role given how new it is, but I’ll give you insight into my journey. I’ve been using AI since ChatGTP first came out at the consumer level, but I got really serious about it more recently when I had the realization that in 2-3 years our business would fundamentally be changed by AI, and if I didn’t keep up, it would pass me by. I think that realization is the first step.
Second, I firmly believe you learn best by actually doing and building versus going to a conference and hearing about it. So, I did what I’ve done my whole career, and I started building on nights and weekends after my kids went to bed. It started as simple agents and a website to track my investments and eventually morphed into some complicated agentic workflows. I think anyone who is going to govern and/or roll this out, needs to have some hands-on experience outside of just using AI as a search agent.
My view is you need to have put 80+ hours into something and then realize it doesn’t work and strip it down and start over. Like anything, you need to be humble enough to be a constant learner.
The CU Daily: What does it mean to have a ‘builder’s mindset?’
Kuhlman: I would say a builder’s mindset is the desire to fully understand a process and the risks involved. It means knowing how to fully walk around an issue, understand all the components, and be able to break it down into steps to get it to the finish line. It’s a skill I’ve used whether it was early in my career building return on assets models or building out a capital planning process. It’s not just understanding the finished product, but also the steps to get there.
The CU Daily: For other credit unions or CU leaders, where do you advise they start on their own AI journeys? What area within credit unions is ripe for improvements from AI?
Kuhlman: I would tell them to go get a paid subscription to Claude or ChatGTP and try to really recreate one business process in an AI native fashion and then mark it to market. Take notes on where was it good; where did it fail; is it repeatable and consistent; did it give me a confident, but wrong answer?
Organizationally I would start with governance. I was fortunate enough to step into this role with a strong second line and information security group that had paved the way already with policies, governance committees, etc. We are a highly regulated industry and owe it to our members to start with strong controls. I think a lot of people jump right into the chat agents or auto decisioning – the sexy, high-profile items.
However, I think there are simpler places, with a smaller risk surface such as finance, IT, and operations that can really provide return on investment and better, faster decision making.
The CU Daily: Do you have any recommendations on where someone can go to educate themselves? Any mistakes from which you’ve learned that might help them save time?
Kuhlman: There are many great options out there for free. Anthropic has tons of classes and their top developers are all over YouTube giving seminars. Also, something that might seem obvious, but go to one of the LLM’s and tell them exactly what your learning objectives are and ask it to build you a course. Use it as a personal tutor. Then use that knowledge to get hands on experience. The lessons hit better after you’ve worked in the tools for a while.
The CU Daily: Has Wings put any AI governance policies/guardrails in place?
Kuhlman: One-hundred percent. We started with governance. In fact, we have been slower to roll out AI tools to ensure we have the right governance in place and manage the risk appropriately. I’m stepping into this role with a really strong governance in place already from our second line, including policies, governance committees, guardrails, etc.
The CU Daily: There is so much talk around AI. How do you respond to worries about jobs? How will it change the financial services marketplace? And how do you think it can change credit unions for the better?
Kuhlman: Technology has always been rumored to remove jobs, whether it was the assembly line or Excel, but I think it just changes the type of jobs and the roles people play. I firmly believe AI will drive more efficiency across the market and will allow us to have more focus on the member and helping them on their journey as well as provide the efficiencies to provide them more value through better rates, better products, faster response times, and more personal contact.
