Ericka Young

Everyone is either all in or completely against AI, and I think we've moved past both of these sides of the spectrum.

I've watched this play out in financial services for the last few years. The institutions that dismissed AI early are scrambling to catch up. The ones that went all in without a plan are realizing the technology alone didn't fix hardly anything at all.

The truth lives somewhere in the middle.

AI is genuinely useful for tracking, budgeting, pattern recognition, and getting someone curious enough to take a first step. It can meet a member at 11pm when no one is in the office. It can surface a pattern a human might miss. That's real value and it's worth building on.

Here's what it can't do: It can't sit with a member who is ashamed of their debt and help them believe they deserve to get out of it. It can't rebuild trust after a financial setback. It can't read the hesitation in someone's voice when they say "I'm fine" but clearly aren't.

The clients who made real progress were the ones who finally had someone walking alongside them.

That's still a human job.

The question worth asking isn't whether to use AI. It's how do we leverage AI to give our team the time, the training, and the support to do the human work that AI will never replace.

That's where I'd start.

If you are earning good money and still feel behind, still feel anxious, still feel like you should have this figured out by now, you are not alone in that.

I've been doing this work for two decades, and one of the most consistent things I've seen, across clients, across organizations, across income levels, is that financial stress does not care how much you make.

The majority of the people I've coached were six-figure earners. Dual income households. People who, by most measures, looked financially fine. They were some of the most stressed, most stuck, most financially overwhelmed people I've ever sat across from.

Financial health doesn't have an income bracket.

It includes the person trying to figure out retirement while also supporting aging parents. The couple navigating a growing family and a growing mortgage. The high earner who never learned the habits to match the income. The person who finally got the salary they worked toward and still feels like something is missing.

Credit unions and financial institutions, your members' income may look fine on paper, but the stress tells a different story. One that goes beyond the numbers and more into the beliefs they carry about money.

When I was first invited to speak at Emerge, I told the organizer I wasn't sure how I fit on this specific panel. The other panelists were bringing data, technology, and systems. I was bringing a coach's perspective. He said, that's exactly what we need.

Now looking back, I feel like a lot of us may have felt this at some point. It captures something bigger that's happening right now.

We've spent the last few years watching the conversation around AI go from one extreme to the other. Completely against it or fully all in, but I think we're entering a new phase, one where we're figuring out how to hold both. The technology AND the human element, together.

At Emerge this year, AI was everywhere. Sessions, tools, and so many conversations, but how people were talking about it was different. Less "this replaces everything" and more "how do we use this alongside the work we do person to person."

It also reminds me of a campaign I recently saw by TD Bank which was centered around a human-first experience.

Financial wellness has always been about behavior, mindset, and trust. You can build the most sophisticated tool in the world and still have someone who won't engage with it because they don't feel seen. That's what I showed up to say on that panel. Not instead of the data, but alongside it.

Sometimes the most valuable thing you can bring to a room is the reminder that there's a real person behind every data point.