AI Boot Camp Is More Than Basic Training At Clearview FCU

Raymond George is on a mission to ensure all new hires at Clearview Federal Credit Union ($2.2B, Moon Township, PA) spend time in boot camp.

Artificial intelligence is a key component of Clearview’s tech toolbox, and George, the credit union’s CIO, is behind the push for all employees to log time in AI boot camp as part of their employee onboarding experience.

“People want AI to do ‘big bang’ things — replace programmers or answer calls,” George says. “Can it assist in all of that? Yes. But it’s not going to replace your people and do everything for you.”

Clearview has put into place a variety of AI tools — including enterprise access to Microsoft’s Copilot; Jasper, an AI-based marketing tool; and LuLu, a lending intelligence solution from ZestAI — and is rolling out site licenses for Claude soon. It also put guardrails around how staff access and use those tools and partnered with tech agency Problem Solutions to roll out four-hour boot camps for senior management and two-hour training for the board.

The curriculum provided an academic understanding of AI tools and a pragmatic look at the overall landscape and how to get the best results. The management team’s training included a brief history of AI and a review of tools but was largely focused on how to choose the right tool for the task at hand and how to design prompts. It even introduced the acronym IMPACT — Intent, Message, Persona, Audience, Context, and Tone — to help craft better AI prompts.

Of course, the boot camp emphasized the importance of human participation, too.

“As a human, you’ve got to bring something to the table,” George says. “Don’t just take the result and say, ‘This is perfect and ready for prime time.’ You have to review it.”

Another Tool In The Box

After successful sessions with the management and board, Clearview expanded the education to all staff and incorporated it into employee onboarding. Rather than offer an in-depth training at the outset of employment, the credit union divides the material into hour-long sessions that focus on how to choose the right tools to use for specific functions, how to build better prompts, how to interact with AI, and how to identify AI’s shortcomings and validate the information it returns.

“It’s no different from teaching somebody how to use the core,” George says. “This is another tool. It’s an internet tool; it’s not this big, mysterious thing.”

Clearview’s leadership has leaned into AI both for its day-to-day productivity gains and for what it means for staff over the long term.

“The younger generation coming out of college has AI as part of their curriculum, and we want to future proof our current staff with this technology,” George says. “AI might not take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI probably will.”

Lessons From Previous Tech Revolutions

Clearview is training its entire staff on AI because it affects the entire workforce. Multiple employees across departments are already using it, and they are sharing successes with one other.

“I don’t want to say there’s peer pressure,” George says. “But they’re seeing what others are able to do, and it’s really helped fuel adoption.”

While acknowledging AI’s massive potential, George noted it’s simply another technological revolution following the rise of personal computers and, later, the internet. But unlike those earlier shifts, AI arrived without a clear cost of entry or gatekeepers. It largely became available to everyone at once for free.

“If companies think they can control this as much as they could other evolutions, they probably can’t,” the CIO says. “So let’s embrace it, understand it, demystify it, and have it work for us so we can be good corporate AI users and not be afraid of this tool.”

Equip your team to lead through disruption. AI is one wave in a longer tide of technological change, and the credit unions that navigate it best will be the ones whose leadership teams share a common framework for evaluating and acting on disruption. Disruptive Strategy for Organizations, offered by Callahan in collaboration with Harvard Business School Online, gives your executive team exactly that. Learn more.

Benefits And Lessons Learned

Clearview uses AI for both internal and external functions, and George says it has been a key driver for increasing personal productivity. That includes anything from speeding up writing job descriptions — “It used to take half a day, now it takes about 34 seconds with a couple of tweaks here and there to the correct prompt,” he says — and summarizing accomplishments to prepare for reviews to looking for patterns within different data sets and analyzing internal chats to improve member experience.

The most effective thing Clearview has done, George says, is to explain AI tools in a way that gives staff the confidence to use them. A few evangelists — including information security and IT leaders — held what George called “a road show,” attending multiple department meetings to field questions from associates at all levels.

“This is a new tool,” George says. “There are no experts at Clearview; we’re all learning this together. But we’re giving the framework and the structure so employees can learn to use it and be more productive.”

And, he adds, use cases are only going to grow.

“The staff has adopted it because we’ve demystified it,” he says. “It’ll probably kill us all at some point, but not right now. And until it kills us, we’ll be more productive.”