Northwest Bancshares puts oversight at the center of AI spending
SiliconANGLE Jonathan Anthony ● Covered by 7 sources
Northwest Bancshares is putting AI spending under tight oversight. Its CFO says the real trick is picking projects that help customers, cut friction and don’t automate bad process.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Jonathan Anthony — read the original for the full story.
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Northwest Bancshares is borrowing a playbook from a much bigger bank, but it isn’t pretending the scale is the same. At the regional lender, chief financial officer Doug Schosser is applying lessons he picked up at KeyBank National Association to decide which AI ideas deserve money, attention and a path to production.
His filter is simple enough to say and hard enough to enforce: customer impact, internal efficiency and risk reduction. That matters because the vendor side keeps moving. Workiva, one of the software partners Schosser carried over from KeyBank, has recently pushed deeper into AI with specialized agents and an intelligence layer for high-stakes reporting.
Schosser’s point is that governance has not kept pace with the tools. He compares AI oversight to the way a company would supervise a junior analyst: closely at the start, with a lot of review, especially when the work touches sensitive data. In his view, the tech is doing similar tasks, just much faster.
That makes data quality the real foundation of the effort. Schosser described the work as an orchestration problem that cuts across finance, information technology and the business lines. If the process is broken, he said, adding a new tool just automates the mess.
The reporting platform he brought over from KeyBank has years of document history, which he sees as useful training material for agents that could absorb routine roll-forward tasks. But the goal is not to replace judgment. It is to free people to do the work that still needs a human eye: explaining the numbers and connecting the dots.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sane way to do AI in finance: start with oversight, not a demo reel. Banks love pretending bad process becomes noble once it has an AI label on it, and it usually doesn’t. The dull stuff — controls, data, review — is the whole point.
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