From Submarines to Banking: Navigating Technological Paradigm Shifts
In this episode of The Purposeful Banker, we share Sam Maule’s keynote from the 2024 BankOnPurpose executive leadership conference, where he likened the pressurized environment of a submarine to the pressures of the banking industry.
Listen
Subscribe
Related Links
Transcript
Cheryl Brown
Hi, and welcome to the Purposeful Banker, the leading commercial banking podcast brought to you by Q2, where we discuss the big topics on the minds of today's best bankers. I'm Cheryl Brown, senior content strategist at Q2 and the producer of the podcast. I'm usually behind the scenes, but I'm taking to the mic today. Welcome to the show. Thanks for tuning in.
Every now and then, we like to use the podcast to share some of the powerful keynotes at our BankOnPurpose executive leadership conference, which we just had back in November. Sam Maule from Moov, who joined us on the pod back in October, spoke at this year's conference about how his experience serving on submarines resembles his 30 years in the banking industry. Listen in as he describes how adaptability, precision, and teamwork are just as crucial to navigating the waters of AI and digital transformation as they are to venturing into the depths of the ocean.
Sam Maule
44 pounds. If there's anything you get out of this talk is that number 44. 44 pounds, because 44 pounds per square inch, that's the amount of pressure that increases against the hull of a submarine for every 100 feet you descend. So at a thousand feet underwater, that's 444 pounds per square inch of pressure. So as a submariner, you quickly realize that pressure is either going to crush you or it's going to motivate you to innovate. Now, in the 30 years—30, by the way—30 years that I've been in banking and fintech since I left the Navy, I've watched pressure increase exponentially on our industry, whether that be through consumers, changes in expectations or SMBs, changes in expectations, fintech companies exploding, regulatory requirements changing, and then big tech. I've watched the introduction of the internet, mobile phones, blockchain, crypto, cloud, and now AI. And like in the submarine, force your survival, literally your survival as an industry depends on how you manage that pressure.
So in submarines we have a saying, pressure is privilege. What we meant by that is we were operating where other people couldn't. Distinct advantage for us. We were pushing boundaries constantly every time we went out to sea. And now as I reflect on being in banking and fintech again for 30 years, I think these market pressures we're seeing, I think there's a lesson there. I know there's stress involved with it, but there's also a signal there that you all need to lean into. That that pressure is opening doors into new territories, into new tech adoption that you can do, and that's where the opportunities are boundless. And thank God that's the only part of the speech I memorized because I hate doing that. So that's me. Spent 10 years in the service from '84 to '94, but in my 10 years on submarines as a Navy SEAL, there's a ridiculous amount of learnings that I could apply.
And if you think I was a Navy SEAL, I got some crypto that I would love to sell to you. I'm not even close. I did, though, go in the Army. I grew up in Detroit, very poor, and a lot of inner-city kids, military was a way out. So at 17 years old, I enlisted. I think I weighed about 120 pounds. God, I was skinny. Notice you go from the Army. I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and at Fort Benning it took about 10 minutes for me to realize I made the gravest mistake of my life. I had signed up to be in the infantry, and I had a smart mouth. I didn't like getting dirty. It was June, it was hot. So I spent the next two months trying to figure out how the hell do I get out of this? If you ever watch MASH, remember Klinger. I was Klinger.
I was like, oh my God, how do I get out of this? So all the way through Infantry Boot Camp and Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Benning, I desperately looked for a way out and I found one because in 1984, the Navy was really hurting for folks that scored really high on math and science and could be nuclear engineers. So I took a test, begged and pleaded and got released to go to active duty in the Navy and I spent 10 years bouncing around on submarines. So you might think, OK, submarines, that's kind of cool. I get asked two questions constantly. Every time somebody finds out I was on subs one, is it like Hunt for Red October? Is it like the movies? God, no. Not even close. I love how Hollywood likes black and red though. Whenever they do a movie poster, you got to give it to them.
Fun movies, they're great. I went in '84, I bought Hunt for Red October. That's when the book had come out. I read it as I was getting ready to go to sub school and Tom Clancy, the author, was an insurance salesman. He didn't get anything right. It wasn't even close. I'm sorry, that's Hollywood. So the only good submarine movie is Das Boat. Really good one in World War II.
The other question I constantly get asked is, how did you do this? How in the world did you do it at 18 years old? How'd you go out to sea for months at a time underwater with 150 guys, no sun, no anything? And the answer is staggering. You do it. That's it. Ask somebody who's an Airborne Ranger, how do you do it? How do you jump out of a plane? You jump out of the plane. How do you become a scuba diver? You go underwater. You just do it. It's a mindset.
I want that to sink in. It's a mindset. And what we're going to be talking about is a shift in mindset because it's amazing how similar my experience in banking and fintech over the past 30 years reflect that first job I had on submarines, the number of things that are in common. We already talked about the external pressure, right? Forty-four pounds per square inch pushing against the hull, and you go deeper than a thousand feet by the way. The internal pressures take when I was in 150 guys, average age of 20 years old and put them in a tube that's 468 feet long and has a beam of 33 feet and say, "You're not going to see the sun for three months. Get along. And by the way, don't launch a nuclear missile and start World War III."
That's the team. That's the staff. Trust me. A lot of internal pressure for that. The tech constantly changed. It was nonstop, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But you constantly had to learn. The ecosystems were so complex because you're in an environment that just wants to kill you, literally wants to kill you. You think regulators are bad. Go on a submarine on patrol for about three months. The environment wants to kill you. And your staff turnover, typical time in a submarine is three years. You spend the first year learning the boat, you spend the second year getting pretty good at it, and you spend the third year teaching the new guys coming on because it's constant turnover. It never ends. You think your staff attrition is bad. Join the military.
So there's a smart dude named JR. I looked him up. Good quote. I like it. This is what I want your mindset to be now. I love what JR said. Being uncomfortable is OK. Being uncomfortable is a good thing. I want you to lean into it for the rest of the day and especially during this talk because we're going to talk about technology, we're going to talk about AI. I'm sorry, but that's where we're going to go. I want you to be a little bit uncomfortable as we do this because there's three important traits. When you ask somebody how could you serve on submarines? I actually looking back on it, I think there's three key traits that a submariner has. Well, four. One, you got to be a little bit nuts. That's one. The second one is you got to be a blank screen. That is incredible. I love that. There it is. You need these. Well, you really do.
You need these three things, and these apply so much to you as leaders, especially in banking right now. These three attributes of a submariner equate to being a leader in banking right now. I embrace this to no end. Being adaptable, a passion for precision and in people—probably should have named that from teamwork to people—the people matter. And that's the three things we want to talk about wrapped around technology and AI as we go through this. So I reported to the boat, that's the boat I reported to, that's the USS Simon Boulevard. SSBN 641. I was on the blue crew. That's what it looked like when I came to it. New Hampshire. I was born in December 1966. I know I look fantastic because I'm an ex-Navy SEAL, but I was born in 1966 in December. That boat was launched in May 1966. The boat I went on was older than me.
Let that sink in. The big black metal tube that went very deep underwater for months at a time was older than me. How many of you drive a 20-year-old car? Is there a hand that went up? Anybody drive a 20-year-old car? Anybody want to take your 20-year-old car on a road trip to California? Good for you. Anybody want to go on a submarine that was 20 years old, older than you? That was my experience. Not only that, that's the computer I worked on. That is the Univac 1289 military computer CP, whatever the heck it is, 890. That was our central navigation computer. That computer right there is what stopped World War III. That computer beat the Russians. That computer stopped the Cold War. That computer was awesome. It was 30 bit hexadecimal display lights, indicators of the data flowing through the input registers and everything else, and I would have to literally translate those, the code from it as I watch everything go.
Ran off of mag tapes. Remember mag tapes? Two data center people, mag tapes, MTU ran it and I had to work on all that equipment. And by the way, that was an old bank computer. Univac took a bank computer from the early ‘60s and that's what provided the navigation for the submarine and every nuclear missile for basically the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s. If that doesn't make you sweat a little bit. So when I say there's a lot of lessons from banking that I took from being on a submarine. Legacy systems. Legacy systems.
So how do I equate that to banking? Please, somebody tell me who this is. What band is this? I have given this presentation and people stared at me and I'm like, I'm done. I am never doing another talk. Rolling Stones. Rolling Stones. What year? Don't look on your phone. What year was this band founded? Come on, whoever gets it gets a Q2 pen. I got one right here, I'll throw it at you. What year? Come on somebody. '66, '68, '61, '62, you were close. You get a Q2 pen. Congratulations. 1962. 1962. They're still touring. Mick Jagger is really good on stage, by the way. Has a great band to go see. Anybody notice that somebody's missing because the drummer passed away because they're starting to age out? The business model's still good. I'm talking to bankers. The business model's still good. They're still making a ton of money. The shelf life is starting to get interesting.
So it's very interesting when we start thinking about, all right, so what does this look like from our standpoint? What I've observed, again, I've worked at fintechs, I work at fintech now, I've worked for big banks, worked at Northern Trust, worked for TSYS, I've been in consulting, I've done the Google thing. So I've pretty much covered all of that, OK? The thing that for me has changed the most is the speed at which everything's moving.
Now, it is unbelievable, and this is a great example of that. Do you know what took the telephone 75 years to reach a hundred million users, 75 years. 16 years for mobile phones to hit a hundred million users? I think that one shocked me a little bit more. 16 years. Seven years for the internet to hit a hundred million users, five years for Twitter—and then one year to lose a hundred million users. WhatsApp, three and a half years, two and a half years for Instagram to get a hundred million users. TikTok, nine months. Anybody notice something? ChatGPT came out 2023, two months, a hundred million users, two months, two months, I believe five days to hit a million users. Two months. Did a hundred million users. This is what we're seeing with the customers you're dealing with is this fear of adoption of tech is going out the window.
How many of you remember when the iPhone did the fingerprint display and every single one of us said, "No one will use that." How do you open your phone now? What? Our face. Isn't that cool? Yeah, people's willingness to adopt technology is unbelievable and moving so fast. So what are some practical applications or strategies for being adaptive? Because on a submarine, trust me, you adapt because again, you're in an environment that simply wants to kill you.
I want to give you a couple of thoughts, a couple strategies. The first one, you're leaders in this space, everybody in this room, you’re leading teams, you’re leading organizations. I will tell you one of the most important things is listen to people that are on this stage with a grain of salt. You should be fact checking what they say, a hundred percent. And you need to learn to identify what's noise and what isn't.
I don't know how people are a pilot, by the way. The good thing on a submarine is you can't see anything. There are no windows. If you didn't know that, you don't see squat. A pilot, seriously, I would be distracted to no end. How they keep their attention span, good for them, but identifying what's noise and what isn't. So I'm going to give you a true story. I've been given permission to tell the story. So my consulting days, I manage Citi. So Citi was my client, spent a lot of time in New York. A very good friend of mine named Yolande Piazza, who's now the head of payments for PayPal, for North America, Canada, Latam. She actually hired me to go to Google, sits on the advisory board for Google Cloud. She's fantastic. Spent 33 years at Citi with a high school diploma. By the way, if you say that you can't make it, Yo is unbelievable.
Remember when Alexa came out and somebody that looked just like me on stage was telling you that voice banking, you needed a strategy, you better have it ready to go? And you read article after article on how voice banking was going to be the next thing and Alexa was going to take off and you're going to talk to Alexa and it was going to tell you your life plan and everything else for the day. So at Citi, Yo was running Citi fintech. She brought all the business leads in from the various organizations. They sat down in Lexington Avenue in New York. You can imagine how much money that costs apply everybody in from all over the world. They sat in a room like this and they said, we're going to talk about Citi's strategy for voice banking. And for about 20 minutes it was chaos. Everybody had a theory and what they needed to do to adopt this. And 20 minutes in Yo quieted the room and she said, "How many of you own an Alexa?"
Anybody want to guess how many hands went up? Kirk? Zero. Not a single one. Solving the world's problems, never even using the tech. So Yo, being a fantastic executive, sent everybody home. She said, "Stop. Meeting's done." Buy everybody an Alexa and we're going to meet in 30 days. Do you know what happened? 30 days later, no meeting took place because everybody realized that’s a really cool voice control radio—didn't have to fly anybody in. Noise. I'm not knocking the tech. The tech is fantastic. This ties into AI because we're talking about natural language processing. I think it's fantastic, but man, sometimes we over hype and get caught in trends. You don't believe me? The island of Anguilla in the Caribbean, 20% of its GDP right now comes from people registering their website as .ai. Every fintech company you know is going to Anguilla and there's one dude sitting in one little office drinking a piña colada and making a lot of money for that island. 20% of the GDP of Anguilla right now is for renaming your domain. That's hype.
I'm really good at changing decks up until the last minute. So I have really cool slides that I can't show you because I did the right thing and gave you all my slides beforehand. I have two slides, Kirk, these are just for you that I included, which are two other points that I want to send home.
Besides identifying noise. You need to overcome inertia. So think about a submarine, big 468-foot metal tube, about 33 feet in height. Take away the sail. What do you think a really long black tube is like sitting dead on the ocean? Six Flags. Y'all go to Six Flags, roller coasters? Nothing. Nothing compared to a submarine sitting dead on the water in the middle of the ocean. If you want to lose weight, forget Ozempic. Do a tour on a submarine. Especially if you grew up in Detroit and never saw the ocean and you thought going in the Navy was a really good decision, this guy. Go through a couple of hurricanes sitting on top of the water in a big back round tube. The worst thing in the world is submarine sitting on top of the ocean, not moving. The next worst thing is the submarine actually moving on top of the water.
The best thing is the submarine going deep and moving because that's where it's meant to be. Inertia is everything you have to overcome. Inertia, true story. And I also have permission to tell this one. Paul Galant, he was the CEO of Citi Cards, corner avenue, New York beautiful office. Took me five years to get a meeting with Paul Galant. Five years of begging to get a meeting as a consultant. Finally got the meeting, brought two of my best guys with me. We go in the room, we're suited and booted. This is going to be great. We sit down with Paul and I do that typical consulting thing. What's the big hairy problem? What can we do to help you out? And Paul wouldn't look at us, he just kept sighing and looking out the window. And as a consultant, when someone goes quiet, you don't say anything. Good consultants, you let the silence fill the room because eventually they'll tell you what's bugging them.
And we did that five minutes—Paul sat there staring out the window, CEO of Cards for Citi stared out the window and I thought, OK, this is a stupid rule. We need to do something. And he finally turned and looked at us and he said, “Help us overcome inertia. We can't make a decision to save our lives.” This was in 2012. You can imagine what it was like working at Citi in 2012. This is a CEO of Cards. “So we can't make a decision. We hire you as a consultant to come in and we pay you a ridiculous amount of money to do a study to tell us whether we should roll off of our card system, IBIS, whether we should go to TSYS, whether we should build our own. We commissioned that study, we set up committees, we review your findings and two years later we hire you to do a study to tell us what we should do. We can't get out of our own way.”
We left that meeting, we're in the elevator. We didn't say a word. We got in the car, we're in the cab going away. And I looked at everybody and said, "He's gone. He's gone. He got a job somewhere." He did. He went to Verifone. Had a blast by the way. Became the CEO and president of Verifone, got to implement chip and pin all throughout Europe, had a blast. But that comment was staggering to me. I thought, “You're a CEO of one of the most powerful banks on the globe and you can't make a decision. You can't get out of your own way.” Folks, that's changed. If there's one thing banks I think are very good at doing, especially at scale, it's making decisions.
JPMC? Dang. Bank of America? Dang. These are reports directly out of Bank of America's quarterly reports that they send out to investors. Bank of America submits more patents than almost any other company in the United States. By the way, if you didn't know that. So in 2022, this is the breakdown of the patents they submitted. Notice the bulk of them, roughly 48%, AI. That was in 2022. AI was 21% of the patents they filed—AI and machine learning. Bank of America, not Google, not Meta, not Microsoft—Bank of America. And then 17% in programming technology. You go to 2023, we start to see a shift. Now it's basically 50% of the patents they're filing going to AI and machine learning and information security. And the latest one in 2024, 26% information security. Trust me, AI is woven all through that and 17% in AI and machine learning.
If you don't think your competition is investing money in this space and moving quickly ... It was our job in the Navy to keep track of what Russia was doing. Thankfully, they suck at submarines. God, they're horrible because they're willing to sacrifice their own people. The number of ... Go out and look, when's the last time the U.S. lost a submarine? All hands, 1968. USS Thresher and the Scorpion. That was the last time. Russians? Sadly about one every other year because of a lack of those characteristics I was talking about. So on submarines, what's incredibly important if you're talking about adaptability, is you want to invest in systems that address the mission. A hundred percent. It's the same for y'all.
Look, I understand core banking. I have been doing this a long time. I've done a lot of bank conversions. I've done a lot of card conversions. I get it. So what do we do? We build wrappers. I mean you know that. Not Snoop Dogg. We build wrappers, we build the wrappers around the tech that we have and that's how we continue to build. But there's a reason Hogan is still out there. There's a reason FIS Profile is still out there. There's a reason a lot of the cores, the majority of the banking cores in the U.S. and the globe were all built. That's just a fact. And you all know it. Pre-mobile phone. So how do we adjust for technology? The wrappers that we put around it. We do the same on submarines. My submarine, again was built before I was born. The number of overhauls that we did in that boat to keep it out at sea and keep it going were unbelievable, and we have to do the same. And I get that.
I think one of the best examples of this that I can think of is this video I'm about to show you. All of you got a guy like this. This is Phil. Phil works for the New York Times, New York Times founded in 1851. So think about that. 1851. Do you know how many photographs the New York Times has taken over a century and a half? Millions. And do you know where they sit? In a place called the morgue in New York City. That's it. And file cabinets. Y'all remember what was the thing we did in libraries? We had to study in school to go look up a book. Boolean. What was it called? Dewey Decimal System. Poor Dewey, that's gone, right? My kids are hilarious. No clue. They're just going to a library. They're just like, I don't know, pulling books off shelf. Imagine literally millions of photographs in a system that looks like that.
That's a real photo. And that's the dude that knows how to work it. And it's like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Remember where they put the Ark in the end? And there's just this warehouse that just keeps going. That was the New York Times. So the New York Times partnered with Google. I'm going to give you a lot of Google examples because I worked at Google and I know the things I'm showing you aren't BS. Microsoft does a great job. Amazon, AWS is great. I'm sticking with Google. I know what's real. OK, so please understand I'm not trying to sell Google, although it'd be nice for my stock, but I'm not trying to sell Google. But Google partnered with the New York Times and I want you to take a look at this. This is what the potential of AI, ML, and others has on a legacy infrastructure.
Video Speaker
So here's the front of the picture, but the back of the picture is just as interesting. The stamps, handwritten notes, etc., that tells us something about the photo, who took it, etc. That is the data we need to extract.
These markers all over the back are the clues for where the picture was used. So here it was published in the newspaper, at least twice. Here we can see the captions that were taped on the back indicating publication. And along this top edge, there's a number. That is the indicator of where this photograph lives inside the morgue or more.
We'll upload them into tools, which will allow the photo editors to search the archive and bring up the images thingy. So once we're done with this, it'll enable the newsroom to immediately access our entire archive from their desktop. Once the pictures are digitized, I mean everything old is new again.
Sam Maule
So here's the good news. Phil still has his job. That guy, his job didn't go away. He still works there. But what the New York Times was able to do is to take all of that legacy infrastructure, digitize it, and now immediately you from, if you're a New York Times reporter, you can access any photo at any time. You can put in a search tag of take your pick. Austin, 1865, May. Photo’s in your hand. Not a request going to Phil. Now let's translate that into our industry. You already know there's a million use cases.
I worked for TSYS for years, most of it over in Europe, so I know cards extremely well. Anybody from TSYS in the room? I don't think so because we're at Q2. Good. A good moneymaker for TSYS is something called an OMR, an option maintenance request. So you want to change something about your program, you submit an OMR, an option maintenance request to TSYS, and about a month later they'll tell you whether that'll work or not. So I'm changing the terms of a card program, but I need people to review the TSYS system TS-II to make sure you don't implode the card program. You can do a rush OMR. That's two weeks. How many of you have the patience to wait for something for two weeks? Not a single person in this room. And get charged for it? Kirk's writing that down. That's not a business model. Kirk, not at all. And get charged for every single OMR that you submit. Now, seriously, think about that process. Think about what AI and ML can do for processes like this.
This past election was very interesting. I have four kids ranging from 30 to 19. I took my 19-year-old to get his driver's license in Florida where we live. Aced the test, did really well. I was really proud of the kid. The lady behind the counter at the DMV's like, "Here you go, son, sign this." And my son stared at me. I'm like, "What's your problem?" So he takes it and he prints his name, Eli, and the lady goes, "No son, I need you to sign it." And then there's an awkward silence as my son, who's an A/B student by the way, stares at me. And the lady literally looked at me and went, "Is he special?" And I thought, oh my God. And I said, "What is your problem?" He goes, "I don't know what she's saying." I'm like, "Sign your name." I literally had to ask for a piece of paper. I signed my son's signature is what I scribbled that day. That's cute.
It actually has impacts in the world. World. How many times have you read about, especially young people, when they're going to vote, their signatures don't match? Happened to my daughter, my daughter, my youngest daughter's traveling through Europe right now, voted absentee. Guess what didn't happen? Her signature didn't match. So we had to do an affidavit and all this other extra process. That's your customers. That's my customers. The world's changing. Are our systems changing to match it?
So a couple of examples, especially around adaptability that I really like. Again, I apologize for the Google pump here, but that's what I know. So one is really interesting. JPMC, you're going to hear them a lot. One, because they got a lot of money to invest. I mean you all know that, right? How many of you have a $14 billion IT budget? Yeah, that's who you're going up against. JPMC has a system called Coin. Anybody ever heard of Coin Contract Intelligence? You should have. So AI ML system to go out and review contracts, look for red flags. They've been using it for a while now. They estimate it saves about 360,000 man-hours of highly trained individuals to review contracts. That's really cool. It's also almost 10 years old, everybody. Coin's not new. This came out in 2016. I'd seriously want that to sink in. That's not new. Think about what it can do today with what you've seen.
The deal that Discover and Google Cloud just did around their contact centers using AI. Here's why I actually love AI for a contact center use case. Because basically what you're doing is you're taking Google search and opening it up to all of your internal documentation. You're creating a large language model for AI of your specific data sets, every material you have. So if I'm in a call center ... How many of you love going on a call center and saying, I need to put you on hold while I access that system? I don't. And it doesn't need to happen because the reality is where we're at today is those technology tools, the AI tools can listen to the conversation, immediately start pulling those prompts up for other systems and making your call center person that much better, saving them the grief, pulling up what they need, initiating the process flows.
None of that is new. All of that exists and it's going to be used heavily and heavily by the larger bank companies. The good news is the cost of that is going to continue to drop just like large screen televisions do and mobile phones and everything else and be available for mass market. Thank God. So that's adaptability.
Second one is precision. What I want to stress here, it's a passion for precision. A passion, a focus on precision because it's very simple, especially with my submarine background. On a submarine, a single mistake kills everybody. It just does. So what do you think our tolerance is for folks who make a lot of mistakes? Politely, a lot of people fall down hatches. It's really weird. There's a lot of small accidents at sea where people leave. You actually get thinned out way before you get to a boat, by the way. You go to sub school, then you go to all the other schools and, trust me, you go through a couple of FBI background checks and everything else before you finally make it to the boat. So the turnout rate on submarines is very, very low because by then they've pretty much got everybody out.
But there are every now and then somebody who just keeps making mistakes. When you make a lot of mistakes, you basically go to one part of the submarine that's called the TDU. The TDU stands for the Trash Disposal Unit. The Trash Disposal Unit is literally a closet from about here to here and about this deep. And that person who keeps making mistakes will spend eight hours in a closet that's about this big, where the rest of the crew will constantly toss trash in there and hit them. Stinks. They've got to take it and they crush it with this trash compactor for us to dispose of it out at the sea. They usually last about two days. About 16 hours is what it takes for them to learn, not to make a mistake or to transfer to an aircraft carrier, which I'm fine with because I think if you make a mistake an aircraft carrier, nobody's going to die, at least to the point that we do on submarines.
So the tolerance is really, really low for this. And you're saying, "Sam, that seems extreme." USS Connecticut, this was two years ago. The USS Connecticut is a Sea Wolf class submarine. That is the baddest submarine. Hunt for Red October is that. That is a bad-ass submarine. The Sea Wolf. Technology is unbelievable. That's about $15 billion to build one of these. I'm not counting what it takes to actually run this. So this crew on the USS Connecticut with the greatest tech you could ever have was at sea in the South China Sea and they hit an underground mountain doing about 15 knots. That's pretty fast. Hit an underwater mountain, tore the whole front of the boat out, 11 people got seriously hurt. Took them about 10 days to get to Guam on the surface. Remember submarines are horrible on the surface.
Imagine being on the Pacific Ocean. Most of everybody's got whiplash or something from this and you're trolling your way at about 5 knots to get to Guam to get fixed. So the investigation on this, what they found was the leadership, the captain, the XO, the chief of the boat, the leadership team on here wasn't doing their job. They were complacent and they were able to show a history of that. They had the best tech in the world, but they were rather complacent. They'd hit a dock before doing a mooring. They had like four incidents that led up to this. Do you know what the cause of this crash was? And they had the best sonar, the best tech in the world on that boat. Do you know why they hit that mountain? They had charts that weren't updated. Charts. Charts that weren't updated because they didn't follow a simple process. Physical charts. Almost took down an entire submarine.
So this concept of being passionate about precision, I embrace to no end. So if you want to know what precision looks like, you want to know what ChatGPT and AI can do? This is probably the best example I've ever seen. I live in Florida. Oh my God. The signs that look like that in Florida, we have signs like this all over Florida, and by the way, they're also in that in Spanish. They're fantastic. They make zero sense and you're trying to figure out if you can park or not. This was an actual use case. Person looked at their phone, held up ChatGPT, and said, "Hey, it's Wednesday at four o'clock. Can I park here? Tell me in a single sentence." That's a prompt. That's an AI prompt. And literally in one second, ChatGPT came back and said, "Yeah, you can park here for an hour starting at 4 p.m." Oh my God, that's a lifesaver. And it's free and it exists. And that's the best example I can think of.
Precision reporting and interpretation. That is a million. That's usually visual. So the AI is able to read those signs. It's able to lump them in together to make sense of them and give you the rules. Think about that response that it did. So the use cases for this start to get interesting. I'm showing this one because I was actually involved in it. So when ChatGPT came out, that was in 2023. June, if I remember right, everybody at Google lost their mind and freaked out as they should. Basically ChatGPT gave you a user interface.
It's like when Steve Jobs and Woz did the Apple computers. It wasn't that they were doing anything that incredible. They're giving you a UI so that not just nerds like me could use computers. They give you an interface that you could use. What's happened with ChatGPT, that's why you're hearing everything in the world about AI right now. The reality is AI, good lord you can go back to World War II if you want to and look at what we've been doing there. It's always been happening, but now we gave it an interface that everybody can play with and use. So at Google we freaked out. We really did freak out when ChatGPT came out and we immediately looked for a partner to say, "OK, how do we prove that our tools are great?"
And we partnered with HSBC Global Bank out of the U.K. We went with them and said, “Let's look for a use case we can tackle. Forget the AI part. What's a use case that's killing you?” False positives were killing them. Absolutely killing them. So using some of the tools that we had brought in their data set, ran this through with machine learning and created a specific solution for them. False positives. In a month. In a month, from the time that we started the POC to the time we finished it in one month, we dropped it 60%. 60%. How hard do you think it was to get a contract? Yeah, damn easy. When you get a result like that, 60% reduction of false positives by using these tools. It's so funny, my daughter just called me from Paris. Everybody I should have took that call. It would've been cool. Poor kid. I love it.
Bank of America, another great example, Erica. How many actually like chatbots? Be honest. Not a single hand. Come on, somebody's got to like a chatbot. Seriously, you've probably been using them but don't even know you're using them. By the way, to be honest, I can tell you who likes chatbots. Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, loves him at chatbot because since he introduced Erica, the 2 billion interactions and growing reduction in costs, when he did his annual report, he wouldn't shut up about Erica and the chatbot that they increased, that they were able to launch. The amount of money that they're saving, the amount of investment. Remember I showed you the patents that they were submitting wrapped around this thing. Massive believer in it. I think it's very important to watch your competition, obviously. I don't want to say to know your enemy because we're all friends, but to know what's going on in the industry, incredibly important. A great example of this.
I love this one because I know Soups. Sardine AI, anybody know Sardine? If you don't, you should love Sardine AI, right? Good company Soups put together. Not that old. I think it's about three years old now. 2020. Soups, the ex-banker knows what he's doing. He did a POC. He just posted this on Twitter two weeks ago and I called them to get more information on it. They did a POC with the client, brought their data points. In a day. In one day, they identified a 90-person fraud ring in Southern California in a day from the data points they were able to collect. How many think he landed that contract? He did. It was really good. Bless his heart. So at Moov, the company I work at, the payments company I work at, we use, we partner with Sardine AI also. So on the fraud front, outstanding tool, outstanding and precise is what you want. All that said, now I want a reality check for all of us. OK? Again, ex-Googler, fintech guy, love tech. A little reality check is good sometimes.
Video of Man and AI
Play jazz.
Playing jazz.
Smoothie.
Making smoothie.
Calendar.
No meetings today. Remember dentist at 9:30.
Fire off.
Fire off.
Open door.
Door open.
Dentist
And we're going to do one more.
Man and AI
Open door.
Wrong voice command.
Open door.
Wrong voice command.
Open door.
Repeat that.
Open door.
I didn't understand that.
Hey, open door.
Play, on the floor.
Not on the floor. Open door.
Hot error.
Hey, fire!
Open door. Open door. Higher.
Higher volume.
Sam Maule
My wife is from Columbus, Georgia. It's one of the reasons I went to her [inaudible]. She's very southern, very southern accent. I'm laughing about JR talking about how he's from the south. My wife has a Volvo XC-90 and she loves to show the voice commands off how she can control the temperature. Name anything in that car, voice commands will do it except if you're from South Georgia and you're not Swedish because she will argue with that car and I think it's the funniest thing in the world, and I'll video her doing it and she'll literally look and want to kill me. But her screaming at a car because of the voice command not working. Every time I see this video cracks me up because it's 100% my wife. Very simple. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Looking right at Q2 people. Just because you can doesn't mean there should actually be a use case.
There should be a reason that you're adopting that tech and implementing it 100%. You start with the problem. You don't start with the solution. We fall in love. Oh my God, especially in this industry with solutions. Don't start there. Start with a customer. What they trying to accomplish? Is tech a good answer or is a simple key going to work? From a military standpoint? I love this example. Anybody read this book? Turn the Ship Around. Good one hand, a couple hands, hit that QR code, take it right to Amazon, order it now. Can't recommend that enough. Your next one of these you do have David come and speak, ex-submarine captain on a submarine. That's God just 100%. Whoever the captain is, they're God.
In order to become a captain of a submarine, you have to go through a year's worth of training just for the boat you're going to please understand that. One boat, one year. You spend a year of your life studying the boat you're going to go to. There's a guy that graduated from the Naval Academy, brilliant, knows his stuff, had to spend a year learning his boat, and then a week before he went to report to his boat, they said, "Oh yeah, you're not going to go to that one. We're going to put you on this one." And the boat he was going to was rated the worst submarine in Naval history. By the way, the worst readiness, ratings, attrition like you wouldn't believe. The staff, the officers horrible. And that's what he inherited. So he talks about it in this book, how he goes to the boat. He's on the most technical boat similar to that Sea Wolf I talked about before. Tech wasn't the issue. The people were, and he talks about how he goes to the boat, works with those people and basically invests in people, not the technology and works with them. Great book. This is actually rated one of the top 10 leadership books of all time. It was USA Today, but so what? One of the top 10 books of all time in leadership. Can't recommend you get it enough.
The point that I want to stress here, it's not the tech, it's the people took two years of studying to get to the submarine because you have to know it inside and out. One of the first things I learned when I got to the boat was this. I went to school for two years, the equivalent of a four-year degree just in a submarine. I show up to the boat. The first thing they did was hand me that. That's a qua card. They said, "Welcome to the USS Simon Boulevard. You need to learn everything forward to aft because we don't want you to kill us." That was another year. Another year of training. Bless my heart. I had to learn about nuclear reactors. I had to learn about ventilation, how to launch a torpedo, how to fight fires, what a pain in the neck. However, a good lesson in there, which is make sure you understand the whole system, especially if you're trying to go in and approve it.
This is Lieutenant Andrea Howard. Follow her on LinkedIn. If you want to follow one of the best LinkedIn accounts, this is an officer serving on submarines right now. She's incredible and she's the face of the Navy right now. She is stellar. Follow her on LinkedIn if you want to see what life is like in the military. But I asked her for this quote, and I love this. This concept of go live with the team, live as a team in order to survive. I love that quote. How do you work together?
That's the one thing I took out. My experience was a little bit different than JR. I was locked in with 150 guys for four months at a time. My longest haul was 113 days straight underwater. It sucked. Going through a sucky experience with other people, you tend to get very close to them and they become lifelong friends. But that concept of we're all in it together is what I want to stress. You are the leaders of your organization. So when you're working with your teams, how you adopt technology matters. You already know this. You get frustrated when you go on calls. Consumers take on AI, they're not thrilled about it. We'll get there, but consumer perception on this, less than 30% of consumers trust AI chatbots. We still have a way to go when it comes to this. So as the leaders and the decisions you're making on this technology adoption, you need to be very, very clear on what you're trying to solve.
And again, JP Morgan's doing it. 140,000 workers, they're giving them, this was just this year, are working with them, implementing this. So AI across the board to make sure their teams are up and running on this and understand it. I've got to ask this. How many of you have ever used ChatGPT or any AI tool? Don't raise your hand. Good. I'm glad you did. But for the people that didn't, I don't want to embarrass you. Remember the Alexa thing I did at the beginning? How many of you are using this every day and understanding what it can do? You need, by the way, every single one of you need to be, because again, Bank of America, 4 billion, you already saw where their investments are going from a patent standpoint. Here's where I want to encourage you. On the team side though, you're the leaders 100%.
What movie is this? Oh, who said that? Who said Hidden Figures? Hidden Figures. Great movie. So the moon landing, right? And the woman that led this, what was her job title? Computer. We landed on the moon in 1968. Her job title was computer. We landed on the moon with pencils and paper and sliding scales. On the moon, which we're struggling to get back to now. We landed on the moon. When they were born, what was the ... Most of those people in the room? 1968. You can do the math. Most of these people are in their 40s, 50s, maybe 60s. What was the normal mode of transportation when they were born? Horse and buggy. Horse and buggy. This group went from horse and buggies to landing on the moon using pencil and paper. Are you shocked at where we are today? You shouldn't be. When we talk about technology, the other thing that I think is incredibly impressive, 60% of the jobs that existed in 2018 didn't exist in 1940. We're all terrified of what AI is going to do for jobs, which we should be, but we're terrified about it.
By the way, the U.S. economy grew 80X during that timeframe as we adopted technology and jobs changed. So this is what I want you to understand. When you're talking to your teams, especially about AI and machine learning and cloud and where we're going, it can be a very stressful environment. I get that. The pressures are intense. One of the best ways to relieve tension on a submarine is to go swimming. This is called a swim call. This is in 10,000 feet of water, by the way. What do you mean no? If you've been cooped up for four months and haven't seen anything, you would dive off that thing. You would be so happy. Trust me. And it's really cool to look down at the 10,000 feet of water. By the way, because you can see the shark coming. No, it's really cool. Technically you can. This was off the coast of Africa. It was fantastic. It isn't 10,000 feet of water, but it's a great way to release stress, right? You've eluded that pressure.
This is what you should be doing with your teams. Big time. Encouraging them. I'm not saying on your time, but encouraging them to go out and learn these tools to play with the prompts. That's a free course. AWS has that. Microsoft has that. Oracle has that. IBM has that. Free courses to learn AI and certify on it. You should be encouraging your people. These are free. I'm giving you something free. You should be encouraging your teams to do it and you should be doing it by the way. Last thing I'm going to say, and this is, I'm looking right at Q2 when I say this. The reason the U.S. has not lost a submarine since 1968 is something called sub safe. So after we lost a thresher, the U.S. military came up with the greatest audit program I've ever seen.
That's what a submarine looks like in a shipyard. There's holes in it, the size of Volkswagen Beetle. All right? Contractors are touching this thing like crazy for about two years working on it to retrofit it, to create those wrappers. So the coolest part, and that's how when I went into the boat in 1985, that's what it looked like. Walked across the plank, got on it, and the ship. That's pretty cool. You can walk under it. See the whole thing. When that goes to sea and does sea trials, every contractor who touched that boat name goes in a hat and 20 of them go out to sea with you. That is the greatest safety program in the world, is to put skin in the game. You want to partner with companies that do that. I know Q2, I am kissing up a little bit, but they put skin in the game and you all know that, and that's why you work with them. You want to partner and work with not only your folks, but folks that you trust.
So adaptability, precision, teamwork. Last thing I'll say, and JR thanks for framing this up. Hire a vet, please. Please hire a vet. Don't ignore them. Look for them. Set up programs to encourage them to apply, mentor them, do it. It is a real need. We've had an entire generation that's been through 20 years of war. I was in the first Gulf War. My experience was I pushed buttons and I watched ... What was that movie? Die Hard, literally. And I got a combat medal for that. So yes, I carry a little bit of guilt for that. That was my experience for the first Gulf War. We've got generations of young people now who have served this country, fought for them. They deserve more from us. I'd love the company they had out there. And thank you.
Cheryl Brown
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of The Purposeful Banker. If you want to catch more episodes, please subscribe to the show wherever you like to listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio. As always, we'd love to hear what you think in the comments, and you can learn more about the company behind the content by visiting us at q2.com. Until next time, this is Cheryl Brown and you've been listening to The Purposeful Banker.