Figuring out how AI fits into enterprises can feel like a full-time job in itself. No surprise then that 72% of CEOs are the main decision makers on AI–double from a year ago, according to recent Boston Consulting Group research.
At Jack Henry, the honor of leading AI strategy falls to Chief Data Officer Keith Fulton, who oversees AI deployment for a financial technology firm that boasts $2.4 billion in annual revenue. Since joining the 50-year-old company 15 months ago, Fulton has been rolling out AI solutions for 7,200-plus employees, as well as for the 7,400 banks and credit unions Jack Henry counts as customers.
The company has approved over 100 AI tools for internal use, including everything from Microsoft Copilot 365, as well as AI capabilities in ServiceNow help desk software and AI programming tools, such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.
“We’ve seen big productivity gains from that,” Fulton says, adding that employees can serve clients more effectively.
AI, served responsibly bold and balanced
Applied with care and precision, AI affords fintech companies huge opportunities to foster competitive differentiation for their customers.
In 2026 Fulton expects Jack Henry will turbocharge AI development and deployment “to get these magical capabilities into the hands of our bankers.” One promising AI feature includes real-time translation in Jack Henry’s customer service chatroom, which supports more than 70 languages. How it works: a customer might type a question in Spanish, which will be translated into English for an American banker to read and respond to.
As he oversees such capabilities, Fulton is following Jack Henry’s philosophy of being “responsibly bold and balanced.” This includes offering toggle switches for AI features that customers can choose to use–or not. Some customers might use all of them, some or none. Giving the customer the control of choice is what matters most.
“AI is the tech revolution of a lifetime, it seems clear, and we need to be ‘bold’ to take advantage of it ourselves and help our clients leverage it as well,” Fulton says. “But our financial clients are very risk averse—mistakes can be super costly and regulators don’t like finding them. So, it’s incumbent on us to also be ‘responsible.’ The ‘balancing’ act between these two mandates is where the exciting innovation is for our company.”
Governance is a top priority for financial services firms operating in a highly regulated space–and AI, with its attendant hallucinations and other gaffes, presents its own special challenge.
To that end, Jack Henry employs a cross-functional governance team that includes staff from Fulton’s team and IT, HR legal and other business units to help determine how to best support employees and customers with AI.
Balancing work, life servant leadership and culture change
While shepherding AI at Jack Henry is Fulton’s chief remit, he feels a strong obligation to help aspiring IT leaders looking to navigate the bureaucratic gauntlet to reach the upper corporate crust that is the vaunted C-suite.
Fulton began his career as a programmer out of college and worked his way up with hard work and technical chops. The skills that Fulton leverages to manage large teams today are broader and deeper than the coding skills that helped him land the CDO role.
Out went the 1s and 0s of coding. In came everything from financial forecasts and budget planning to organizational design, not to mention collaboration with peers from other divisions and presenting and selling ideas to upper management. All of these tasks are very different from coding, let alone IT architecture.
Fulton will share key lessons from his book, “Maxing Out: How to Get the Most out of Yourself and Your Team,” at the CIO 100 Leadership Live Atlanta event in March.
Topics will include the importance of creating work-life balance. “You can’t check out at 5:01 p.m. and be a good teammate for your people or be dependable for your boss,” Fulton says, adding that being dependable for family is also a top priority.
Fulton will also discuss the importance of cultivating trust across team members, peers and vendors. This was especially challenging for a no-nonsense developer like Fulton.
“As the teams kept growing, I couldn’t even know what they were all coding! I had to learn to trust them and delegate the work that I was best at, to make time for the management work I was learning.”
Servant leadership, including how to be a better leader for and coax more out of their teams, is another talking topic. Fulton will also tackle culture change, a frightening theme for people averse to too much disruption.
“These are some of the dilemmas I’ve wrestled with over the past 10 years of my career,” says Fulton, who also dispenses these nuggets of advice on Substack in articles titled “Just Give Me the Damn Ball” and “Deck Chairs on the Titanic.”
Read More from This Article: Inside Jack Henry’s bold-but-balanced AI revolution
Source: News