Most of what I’ve read about AI in community banking sounds crazy…and mostly it is.
On our final day of the Teslar User Conference, and to wrap up my four-part series on the future of Teslar, we walked bankers through what AI really means for community banking, from Teslar’s perspective.
There’s a lot of hype suggesting that AI will annihilate community banks, saying there will be no way to compete or keep up. I just don’t see it, if we get past the hysteria, we can look at it logically. In fact, I would say the opposite may be true, if community banks can leverage AI successfully, they will be able to gain a lot of operational and compliance efficiency and compete on service, an area they can win on.
So, let’s dig into what AI (as of today, will change tomorrow) does well and what it does not do well. Believe it or not, AI (LLMs) are not good at complex math and human empathy. Not to mention projecting the future. Human life is chaotic and human behavior is unpredictable. Because of that, I cannot see AI replacing truly relationship-focused lenders anytime soon. But AI is really great at pattern recognition, repetitive tasks, a limitless knowledgebase (with training), and processing large amounts of information.
Using that amazing pattern recognition and the deep integrations we talked about in part three of this series, we are focusing Teslar to look at tasks that require a lot of human interaction, lots of internal touch points, but are essentially repetitive and pattern matching.
Through deep integrations and trained AI models, we expect to automate more than 50% of the daily tasks currently handled by loan and deposit operations teams. We also plan to streamline many repetitive tasks for lenders and loan assistants too, replacing the time spent on repetitive tasks with time to focus on people and relationships. Which is what truly sets community banks apart from the competition.
Get ready for 2026. The way credit administration and operations function in community banking is going to change in major ways, and Teslar is helping lead that change.
(Pictured: At the 2025 Teslar User Conference, Teslar's Lead AI and Prototyping Engineer, Jacob Loukota, shares about AI in community banking)
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