The new resource combines industry research with practical roadmaps, templates and checklists to help the entire C-suite guarantee AI returns in 2027
Glia, the #1 Banking AI platform, and Alloy Labs, the financial industry’s premier member-driven innovation alliance, announced the joint release of the 2026-27 Banking AI Strategic Annual Planning Kit.
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Designed to help regional and community financial institutions navigate unprecedented complexity and sharper competition this planning season, this practical kit addresses a major industry paradox: While AI is now the top technology budget item for banks and credit unions, roughly 80% of institutions report that early adoption has failed to improve their bottom line. This new cross-functional blueprint helps leadership teams bridge that gap and safely accomplish core goals — lowering operating costs, driving loan and deposit growth, and preventing account holder attrition — by providing clear governance templates, an enterprise-wide roadmap and strategies to deploy banking-specific AI without introducing the security and compliance risks many institutions are unknowingly accepting with industry-agnostic AI vendors.
“As the 2027 planning cycle begins, banks and credit unions are facing a perfect storm. Financial institutions are trying to protect their core deposits, keep the next generation from moving their inheritance away and somehow find growth in a flat market,” said Dan Michaeli, CEO and co-founder of Glia. “Throw in talent shortages, compliance headaches and rising fraud, and the old strategic planning playbook just won’t cut it. We built this resource because executives don’t need more AI hype. They need a practical blueprint to prioritize their efforts to handle all these pressures at once.”
A Sneak Peek Inside the Kit: Guidance for Banking Executives
Built as a practical workbook to break down traditional siloes between leadership teams from IT and operations to lending and compliance, the kit considers how financial institutions have traditionally scaled and how that equation must change with banking-specific AI, covering core topics such as:
- Rethinking Growth Amid Shifting Preferences: How to look past traditional inbound support and leverage a smart mix of conversational, automated outbound voice and SMS outreach to fuel loan and deposit volumes. By shifting from reactive to proactive support, leaders can maximize their team’s productivity and impact while minimizing the effects of employee attrition on service levels and experience.
- Driving Value Across the Entire Institution: Why meaningful impact requires a unified strategy rather than isolated tech experiments. The kit details a clear Centralized Product Ownership Model to align the C-suite, a Three-Phase Roadmap to scale smoothly without disrupting workflows and a practical framework for launching a Universal Banker model that elevates your entire workforce.
- Navigating the Reality of Risk: An honest look at the operational liabilities of doing nothing — or of choosing a generic, non-banking AI partner. The kit offers critical parameters for evaluating cybersecurity architectures and regulatory compliance factors to protect your institution from hallucinations, data leaks and vendor sprawl.
“This is the first planning cycle where AI strategy and bank strategy are the same conversation,” said Jason Henrichs, CEO of Alloy Labs. “Boards are approving budgets for technology that moves faster than any planning process built to contain it — and institutions treating that as a line item rather than a set of strategic choices will spend 2027 explaining why the spend never reached the bottom line. We’ve sat in rooms full of bank technology leaders and asked how many have a single AI agent in production. Silence. These aren’t laggards. They have board mandates and completed pilots. What’s missing is the bridge from experiment to strategy, and that’s a planning problem, not a technology one. We built this kit with Glia to close that gap. Glia was the right partner because they’ve done the production-scale work in banking that most AI vendors only put in slide decks.”
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