The One-Person Marketing Team Leveraging AI at Scale with Lacey Keller

speaker-2 (00:19.662)
Well, hey everybody, and welcome back to the Community Bank Podcast. This is the podcast by Bankers for Bankers. I’m Caleb Stevens with South State Bank’s Capital Markets Division. A couple of weeks ago, we had Greg Solomon from Bank Independent on the show to talk about how AI is changing the way that they approach banking. And today we’re returning to the topic with Lacey Keller. She’s a marketing coordinator at First National Bank of Waterloo. And she sits down again with our own Chris Nichols. So

I hope you enjoy the show. And speaking of AI, there’s a lot of uncertainty around how it’s going to change the nature of deposits. And one of the most important decisions you can make as a bank executive is how to deploy your deposits well. We know that earning a yield above Fed funds can be difficult when you’re not making a loan or buying a bond. And so if the cash on your balance sheet is only earning the current Fed funds rate and you’re looking for a way to increase your yield without sacrificing liquidity,

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It pays a rate above Fed funds and it reimburses you for expenses your bank is already paying, whether that’s core charges, vendor charges. To learn more about how the program works and how to join, click the link in the show notes of this episode. Now let’s jump into the conversation with Lacey and Chris.

speaker-1 (02:11.362)
Lacey, thanks for being on and welcome to the show. I’m excited to talk to you. You captured my attention at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference. as we talked about AI and your use of AI. you are one of the standout bankers, so we wanted to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

speaker-3 (02:26.616)
Well thank you for having me.

speaker-0 (02:27.564)
I’m excited to be here and glad you I caught your attention. Hopefully I can catch

speaker-3 (02:32.181)
More people today.

speaker-1 (02:33.555)
No no doubt, no doubt. let’s start off. Tell us a little bit about what your areas of responsibilities are and what you do at the bank.

speaker-3 (02:41.356)
Yeah, so a little bit of

speaker-0 (02:43.042)
an interesting situation in our bank. We are nine forty nine hundred and forty eight million in assets, 17 locations, and I’m the sole marketer, the sole marketing employee for our bank, which is great. We do work with an agency. but I also help support our board of directors as serving as the corporate secretary and then as well work directly with our president CEO Rick Park. So kind of

speaker-3 (02:59.278)
Also on the side I also

speaker-0 (03:12.856)
But it’s a great mix. I can really learn about what the board, what their goals and strategic plans are, and I can help, you know, facilitate those goals too with marketing.

speaker-1 (03:24.448)
So at the conference we did this s kind of survey and there was c about twenty percent of the banks that weren’t even using AI, that weren’t allowed to use AI. And we talked about, you know, that that may not be the best path, that this is a significant risk. And then like you’re on the other side, you had your group vibe coding things up and showing your dashboards. tell us about how long you’ve been using AI at the bank and kind of that progression. and what’s your normal use case right now?

speaker-3 (03:49.718)
Yeah, so I would say

speaker-0 (03:52.558)
Going on a year, we’ve been working maybe a little over a year, where people were getting curious, and people were, you know, I was curious in my personal life, and I think that’s kind of where we started. We approached the subject with our executive team and our IT department. You know, how can we use AI to better you know, use better use of our time, make ourselves more efficient, and it kind of snowballed from there. our executive team tasked

speaker-3 (04:10.734)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (04:22.658)
the bank with creating an AI innovations committee. and we have just snowballed from there, you know, we have everyone from loans from marketing to operations to loan operations to compliance on this committee. And we get together every other week and we’re just in there getting it done. We got it, you know, approved with an enter si enterprise plan with Gemini since we’re a Google based bank, which is a little bit different. So

Yeah, so we’re we just hit the road running and we didn’t say no we can’t do it and we’re gonna do it and find efficiencies and we’ve just been hitting it hard ex like six, seven months I would say, and we’ve come leaps and bounds on on where we’re at.

speaker-1 (05:07.83)
And give us a feel for how widespread it is within the bank. I mean, you’re obviously a user, but is is it every employee? Is it half the employees? What would you say is the percentage that’s proficient?

speaker-3 (05:19.318)
That’s a question.

speaker-0 (05:21.238)
Everybody in our bank has access to Gemini. So that is where our policy says, you know, we can put customer sensitive data in there. That’s where our policy lies. So everybody does have access to Gemini.

speaker-1 (05:33.198)
version, it’s ring fence, it’s controlled, it’s within your environment. So you guys are comfortable, much like many banks out there like like ourselves using Copilot, same structure. We have Microsoft controlling our data and you know, tagging our data and so managing the et cetera. So same thing. So you’re safe and sound. Keep going. Sorry.

speaker-3 (05:51.852)
Yeah, you’re fine. So we also so yeah, everybody I would say

speaker-0 (05:55.438)
to that. how right now, especially after a lot of training we’ve done with our staff. I mean, we’ve put on videos, we’ve done in-person training, we’ve hired outside facilitators to do training with us. And I would have about like a fifty to sixty percent usage of of Gemini within our bank. Now rights for certain people who for instance marketing, I have access to Claude. Now I’m not putting any sensitive data in there, but I

speaker-3 (06:13.486)
We do have exclusive

speaker-0 (06:24.798)
use Claude and Chat GPT pretty interchangeably. and so we do have access throughout some employees with that, but we don’t free rein that with with the entire staff. They have a compelling reason, you know, why you’d like to have Claude. We’re happy to to review it and and talk about it and, you know, and giving access to people. Our IT department’s pretty open about it ’cause they feel secure within Gemini.

speaker-1 (06:47.36)
Lacey, you’ve seen it before and after. How has AI changed your job as a one person marketer at your bank?

speaker-0 (06:56.846)
Honestly, I think it’s the the time saving. I have been hitting the hard the road pretty hard on just asking AI how it can save me time from creating Facebook posts and content and email campaigns, campaign idea, creative, you know, headline scripts for email scripts for interviews for video. it’s just been a huge time saver.

speaker-3 (06:57.166)
I think it’s

speaker-3 (07:10.456)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (07:24.482)
I think the biggest part of it is agents is also creating agents. So in the Gemini world, we call them gems. In the co-pilot world, I’m not really sure what what are they called? And agents has been a huge time saver. I have a couple of them setting up to preview my, you know, emails that come in. you know, what’s something that I need to know out of this email that re that’s in regards to banking or marketing or, you know, the the the industry, all these things.

speaker-3 (07:35.544)
But anyway, creating

speaker-0 (07:54.382)
is kind of being felt, you know, fielded by my agent. And it kind of gives me an overview every day of, you know, stuff that I don’t have to go in and read each email. So that’s been a huge time saver. I think starting I and I’ve this is kind of a work in progress for me, but creating, you know, some basic Facebook ads and and the actual image for the Facebook ad, creating a an agent for that that knows our branding. I don’t have to start from zero. I’ve

create I’ve I’ve fed it our brand guidelines, what our color scheme is, what our brand voice is, what you know, that we’re a community bank. So not starting from zero and creating and creating those ads constantly. so the agent I have for creating ads has been a huge time saver just for it knows our brand voice, it knows who we are, it knows our colors, it knows what I want in an ad. I’ve fed it

speaker-3 (08:35.192)
The the

speaker-0 (08:51.144)
past ads that we have had our agencies create. that’s been

speaker-3 (08:55.511)
one of the coolest

speaker-0 (08:58.53)
things that I think I’ve done that I’m the most proud of is I took our marketing budget spreadsheet, which is an old time spreadsheet through Google Sheets, and I had it design a whole board that I can easily log in, see where our budget is as of month end or, you know, year end mu as as of last year. What did we spend in the first and second quarter? Where is our money being spent? Where, you know, I need it

speaker-3 (09:10.829)
Dash

speaker-0 (09:27.97)
broke down into the different branches for their sponsorship budgets and things like that. that has been a huge time saver for me. Cause I don’t have to go in there and, you know, find the formula and bring it over of what you know our main banking center has spent in sponsorships this year. How much of that budget, you know, do I have in promotional items left over? That has been a huge time saver for me just in general, because I would spend months uploading all that data into

speaker-3 (09:35.821)
Just because

speaker-0 (09:56.588)
my spreadsheet and then having to decipher what bucket goes into where. That has been great. I also have it to where all my branch managers can see that too and they can see where they’re at in their sponsorships as well, which is a huge for not having to hunt down, you know, where their budget sits for for this time of year.

speaker-1 (10:15.32)
Gets everyone on the same page as well. So nice attributes there. fantastic. And and so tell us a little bit about how you publish a dashboard like that. You’re just coding it up and putting it out there? any type of review process? Is it you know, it sounds like you’re very entrepreneurial here.

speaker-3 (10:33.398)
Yeah, so I actually work with

speaker-0 (10:34.99)
plot a lot to to create the coding. And so I coded it up and we I basically copy and paste that code into Google Script and then Google Script will publish that that landing page or that site and then we can share that internally with anybody that we’d like within the bank. It it’s very easy.

speaker-1 (10:54.776)
Got it. And you’re doing all this in natural language using gem, an agent. and the beauty of it is that you’re creating one agent that you can now improve that has, as you said, has your branding standards, your brand standards has your you know, the way you do business. And so that’s part of the beauty as as opposed to just doing a prompt, right? Now you can create a specialty agent. So I think that question came up in at the conference there.

speaker-3 (11:22.924)
Yeah, and I’m always

speaker-0 (11:23.81)
working within that agent to make it better. You know, if there’s something that the that the gem spits out that I don’t really particularly care for, I’ll like a person, like, hey, I didn’t really like that. Maybe going forward in the future, let’s omit that and start doing it this way. I’m always working on that gem.

speaker-1 (11:43.688)
And it sounds like you now spend most of your time or a a large part of your time just managing agents, kicking off, revising the agents, as opposed to actually, you know, what you used to do is, you know, create content and play with Adobe and, you know, Photoshop. Is that right? Is that basically how your job’s evolved?

speaker-0 (12:02.328)
And a good percentage, I’d say at least half the time within that AI world, prompting. Prompting is your most important. And that’s no different within your agent is to to train and tell your agent what you want and how you want things built and done. Yeah, I I’m constantly working within prompting or telling my agents.

speaker-1 (12:22.23)
And so for listeners, I just want to point out like this is the new change in banking. Like not only do you need to hire and train the talent to handle NGET AI, but also now you’re managing that and it’s a whole different skill set than the traditional bank marketer or the traditional, you know, credit underwriter, et cetera.

speaker-0 (12:42.317)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-3 (12:44.758)
Yeah, treat this as your in

speaker-0 (12:45.998)
intern that you hired, you know, from, you know, as a as a program out of college. This is you gotta train it and you have to tell it what you want. Exactly, Chris. Yeah.

speaker-1 (12:56.02)
And and you have to know the limitations. So, you know, we talked a little bit about that, about what you know, what you can and cannot ask that would do it effectively and watch for hallucinations and w you know, watch for errors and as you said, self correct. and you’ve n you have a dozen you you showed a couple different dashboards to the group, so you you it sounds like you’re creating, you know, models and and tools every day.

speaker-3 (13:19.234)
Yeah, so one I

speaker-0 (13:20.076)
just did last week. We’re getting ready to have employee appreciation is a really exciting time to go hand in hand in that we’re having an employee fall festival. Well I wanted everything about our employee to be in one central location where they’re not hunting down emails. They’re not hunting our intranet to find information regarding the week, the spirit the dress up days. So I had Claude just create the code for a one landing page where employees can go out there and sign up to

speaker-3 (13:23.448)
Which is exciting.

speaker-3 (13:40.462)
Yeah, week.

speaker-0 (13:50.072)
participate in the games that day if they, you know, want to request a song, if they want to put a shout out there, you know, to a fellow employee, all within that prompt and all within that code, uploaded it to Google Script, sent it to employees. I just did this last week very quickly. I mean it cut my time. I could have, you know, done all these different flyers and all these different things and sent it out to the branches and it saved me time. And it’s easier on our employees too to find the information.

speaker-3 (14:16.022)
Your own employees.

speaker-1 (14:19.662)
What are you working on next? What’s what how are you training yourself or what do you what do you want to push into leveraging AI or engine AI?

speaker-3 (14:28.342)
Yeah, so I think

speaker-0 (14:30.232)
Kind of some next projects with especially within marketing is are there any shortfalls that we have within our current customers? You know, our call center is busy. So we’re actually working on a call center dashboard where all of our calls can be recorded as okay, what did what did we what did this customer call in today? That’ll automatically feed kind of in our dashboard. And then I can start monitoring it that wow, okay, we’re having a lot of calls about.

And use an example, online banking passwords or, you know, I can’t get my multifactor, you know, second password to to text me. What’s going on? Am I locked out? And I think that’s gonna be kind of eye-opening. What do we need to tell our customers? And I think that’s our next step that we’re working for is creating that dashboard so that what are we missing within our customers? What do they not know about? Are they calling about HELOCs? Are they calling about, you know,

How to set up an automatic payment transfer, you know, those kind of things. What do we need to customers about? And I think that’s gonna be a big deal for us.

speaker-3 (15:28.226)
Informar

speaker-3 (15:32.13)
Some other things I think that is

speaker-0 (15:33.794)
that’s coming down the pipeline is we’re looking into creating like our own CRM CRMs we’ve we we’re interested in it, but we’re gonna AI can kind of help create

speaker-3 (15:39.426)
Weave shops.

speaker-3 (15:43.022)
Which is a big deal and that is bank wide.

speaker-0 (15:47.322)
That’s gonna help our production team, our lenders and our managers, you know, for tracking. We you know, we know how a CRM works, but the fact that we can have AI and have our own program within our bank work for us the way we need it to is gonna be a big deal too. And as well in the marketing world. I mean, that goes hand in hand.

speaker-1 (16:05.782)
Very ambitious, impressive. I know at the conference we try to tackle vibe coding up a LOS a loan operating system. and so, you know, that’s kind of another big effort that you know, Ben Udall kind of showed us how to how to manage. and I love to see that you’re you’re trying to tackle something similar and and solve problems at the bank. ‘Cause now instead of running out and buying a HubSpot or Salesforce that may be too much for a bank, you can just code what you need and build it over time. so fantastic.

as we wrap up, if there was one tip for a bank marketer to get better at AI or to help their bank get better at AI, Lacey, what what tip would you give them? What’s your one tip?

speaker-3 (16:49.206)
Yeah, so I’m gonna say you don’t have to

speaker-0 (16:51.886)
an AI expert. just starting it. Start

speaker-3 (16:54.19)
Start using with one annoying task that you have

speaker-0 (16:58.156)
that you do over and over and over and ask how can you help me with it? You can start high, you can start low, you can start wherever you want with your AI journey. Just just ask it. And if you don’t like

speaker-3 (17:10.786)
The output that it gives, tell it. Say, hey, I don’t like this.

speaker-0 (17:14.793)
Let’s improve on this. You you have to start somewhere. And I think just diving in and just getting those annoying, recurring tasks off your plate is the number one thing that I think can help people that may be wary of it.

speaker-1 (17:30.2)
Love that. And and I would add, you know, anytime you’re going in and out of a spreadsheet, anytime you’re switching applications, those are all prime candidates for workflow to, you know, reimagine and to think, okay, t let’s take a step back. How can we make this even better? And where does NGNIC AI and AI play into that and then go ahead and create your agent one step at a time? Like you talked about at the conference. Like you just started small, solved one little problem, added on, built it over time, and you produce some beautiful dashboards and beautiful agents. So impressive.

speaker-3 (17:58.574)
Well and I I asked can you help me? What as I

speaker-0 (18:00.278)
You know, Gemini how can

I, as a marketer, a bank marketer, sole person, what you tell me that I need to ask you to.

speaker-3 (18:07.598)
can you to do? And I still do that. What am I missing? What can’t you know what am I

speaker-0 (18:12.92)
Missing you know, what am I not understanding within the content that I’m trying to get out? What am I missing within the campaign? I think that’s a huge takeaway for

speaker-3 (18:20.945)
I still asked that too.

speaker-1 (18:26.754)
Love that bonus tip, let AI teach you about AI. Lacey Keller, thank you very much for being with us. We appreciate you sharing your knowledge with the banking industry and look forward to seeing more great work out of you and the bank.

speaker-3 (18:38.433)
Awesome. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.