Building Your 2027 Business Case for AI

A real credit union's budgeting playbook: Hudson Valley Credit Union's Steve Goodwine joins Kathy Sianis to break down how financial institutions build the business case, find the budget, and prove the ROI for AI.

Budget season is coming, and if you're championing AI at your institution, you already know the hard part isn't the technology, it's the conversation with your board and finance team. How do you put a number on "better member experience"? How do you defend a line item against a dozen other competing priorities?

The biggest mindset shift: stop treating AI as a new expense and start treating it as a reallocation of dollars you're already spending. In this session, Kathy Sianis will walk through how leading credit unions and banks are framing AI investment for budget season, from building a business case your CFO will actually believe, to tracking the metrics that prove value long after the check is signed. She will be joined by Steve Goodwine of Hudson Valley Credit Union to discuss how his team approached budgeting, built executive support, and measured success.

Whether you're pitching your first AI initiative or defending a renewal, you'll leave with a clearer story to tell and the data to back it up.

Key Takeaways

• How to build a budget-ready business case: a repeatable six-step framework (current cost, future state, investment, annual benefit, payback, 3-year ROI) that speaks the language finance teams and boards actually respond to, not just tech teams
• Where to find the dollars: a budget displacement map showing which of today's line items (IVR, QA labor, training vendors, knowledge search, direct mail, website search, manual workflows) map directly to an AI solution you can fund by reallocating, not adding
• A practical ROI framework: the four ways AI creates value (reducing existing costs, avoiding future costs, improving employee capacity, improving member experience) and how to separate "nice to have" metrics from the ones that actually move the needle
• How to prioritize what to fund first: a scorecard for ranking initiatives by business value, member impact, employee impact, implementation complexity, and time to value
• Common budget season pitfalls: the mistakes that stall AI proposals, and how to avoid them
• Real institution examples: how a peer credit union or bank has successfully secured (and renewed) AI budget, in their own words