Every year, U.S. Bank's innovation team goes to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to scope out new technologies, weird and wonderful, that could affect customer experience and the delivery of financial services in the future.
This year, AI was everywhere at CES. The opening keynote was a 90-minute speech by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who talked about gaming, autonomous vehicles, robotics and agentic AI.
AI is advancing at an "incredible pace," Huang told the audience of more than 6,000 people.
"It started with perception AI — understanding images, words and sounds," he said. "Then generative AI — creating text, images and sound. Now, we're entering the era of physical AI, AI that can proceed, reason, plan and act."
U.S. Bank's Chief Innovation Officer Don Relyea and Head of Applied Foresights Todder Moning shared their take on AI and all the other technology on display at the show, in an interview.
Did it seem to you that AI dominated the show this year?
TODDER MONING: Yes. This year, every booth had AI this and AI that, whether you need it or not. There was even a grill that had AI in it.
DON RELYEA: Last year we saw AI in toilets. This year we saw AI water. There were a few more mature companies like Samsung, which had used some combination of traditional AI, agentic AI and GPTs around really interesting customer use cases. We were seeing folks that are more mature in the customer centered design space looking at making proactive, predictive, ambient type experiences.
One of the things we're looking for from a trend standpoint is, when is the bar for our customers' experience going to be raised? The standard in digital right now is, I want to be able to do things where customers want to do it. We think the next trend is probably going to be, do it for me. So watching for, when is the consumer space going to hit that tipping point, through different flavors of AI mixed with improvements in devices.
Jensen Huang talked about agentic AI and there's been buzz around it lately. I've sensed that most banks are not quite ready to have generative AI actually do stuff, not without a human in the loop verifying or okaying certain steps in the process. But completely unattended agentic AI seems a ways away in the banking industry. What do you think?
DON RELYEA: I agree with that.
TODDER MONING: It depends on the use case. But absolutely, enterprises need to test it. We're testing it internally to see how good it is. There are some out there, like Salesforce, that are putting agentic AI into their products. Just to set it loose directly, consumer facing, without somebody in the loop, it needs to be pretty ready. I think enterprises are probably going to have to experience it and get over that hump first before they expose consumers to it.
At the same time, the same way that this constellation of devices continues to balloon and be connected with sensors, the same thing's going to happen with AI assistants and GPTs, consumers are going to start discovering them and using them more and more. And at some point, their AI agent is going to show up on our front door. We're going to have to make sure that our people, as well as our AI agents, are able to work with them and service them in that future.
DON RELYEA: Banks are risk averse, that's why we've got humans in the loop. Generative AI is really good at retrieving information and summarizing data from large knowledge bases. But if you ask it a question where it needs to do any kind of calculation, you're asking for trouble. I'm sure the tech will get better, but it's a ways away.
Every year you look at a lot of connected devices at CES. Did you see any that a bank like yours might want to connect with or create an app for?
DON RELYEA: We did see some great stuff in the Samsung booth's SmartThings Pro zone, which was designed for retail environments but could have an application in the branch of the future. It basically enables an aware environment — the environment is aware of the people that are in it. It can adjust climate. Eventually, it'll be able to detect sentiment. It can control signage within the retail space.
TODDER MONING: In the booth next to that, there was similar technology for multifamily housing: being able to manage it, monitor it, control it. Not just the utilities, but a whole range of things, which could be useful in consumer mortgages and real estate loans to those kinds of entities. The surprising one this year was Samsung Heavy Industries. They started enabling ships of all sorts, everything from yachts all the way up to ocean liners, with tons of sensors and capabilities.
Could that be used for tracking shipments or something like that?
TODDER MONING: It could be used for ocean shipping and offshore oil facilities. But it also works in smart homes, personal boats for lakes, etc., and RVs. It just continues to permeate more and more devices in more and more places.
So these sensors could help lenders understand the condition of a property? A couple of years ago at CES, I think there were sensors that detected the presence of water, so if you had a loan or some sort of interest in a building, you could detect that there was flooding or a mold problem.
TODDER MONING: I've got water sensors in my house, next to my water heater, next to my washing machine on the second floor. We've discovered in other work that we've done that when you get water damage, that's expensive.
What about smart cars, or internet-connected cars. I remember
DON RELYEA: One thing we noticed last year and this year is, eventually there's going to be semiautonomous driving. That means interior displays can be more immersive, in particular for passengers. So there's a lot of concepts around mobile entertainment, paying for subscriptions while you're in there, that kind of thing. We've seen big electronics companies partnering with big automobile manufacturers for these types of things.
Someone could do their mobile banking from their car or pay for something.
DON RELYEA: It's using the display as a large screen space. So instead of doing it from your laptop or your phone, you might have a larger screen space within the vehicle.
TODDER MONING: We see industrial use cases, too. For instance, Deere always shows autonomous tractors. This year, we were able to remotely dig using a big Caterpillar excavator that was in Arizona. Nvidia announced Cosmos, a platform that won Best in Show. It's enabling self-driving vehicles and robots in factories. They're partnering with Toyota and Uber. Uber, of course, has millions of miles worth of recorded telemetrics and journeys, and that can be used to speed up the training of these self-driving vehicles so that hopefully one day soon they'll be safe enough.
DON RELYEA: That's one of the other growing trends we've seen: edge AI. Right now, most of the AI is happening in the cloud. But companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm are coming up with really powerful computing chips, and they're putting them in laptops, they could be put in vehicles. Eventually they'll end up in phones, and they'll be able to do the AI crunching locally, on local data, which changes the paradigm from what we've seen in the past.
TODDER MONING: If you think about your computer having a large language model and a large action model, and being able to retrieve all of your data there, there's a lot of interesting things you can do with that.
Does that make your job harder, because you've got to create banking apps for millions of customers who all have different devices that have different LLMs?
TODDER MONING: We've had that problem a number of times in the past — when we first did web banking, when we developed mobile banking. Then it became, well, Apple and Google or Android are going to be the main phones. We had phones that were on Windows, we had things we had to build for Windows and other stuff on phones that never sort of broke through.
What else caught your eye at the show?
TODDER MONING: Don got a chance to play around with Shinhan Bank's AI branch concept. It also had a really interesting venture portfolio success predictor.
DON RELYEA: The thing that we really noticed this time is smart glasses are getting smaller and the quality is getting better. There's holographic lenses which are transparent, which are getting better. Designers like Luxottica are getting involved in the design of these glasses, so they're becoming a little bit more fashionable.
We're waiting for the tipping point in that space to begin moving forward. But I think it's making some progress. For us, the tipping point is when those devices are with us all the time, the same way our phones are now. Right now, it's a helmet, a goggle or an extremely nerdy pair of glasses — I won't look any different and neither will Todder. But for the rest of the population, it's still probably a little ways away.
TODDER MONING: We shook hands with our first humanoid robot.
How creepy was that?
TODDER MONING: Pretty creepy. It was creepy to touch their hands. They were in the uncanny valley.
Was there anything really weird that stood out to you this year?
TODDER MONING: There was a spoon from Kirin Holdings, a Japanese company, called the electric salt spoon. It delivers mild electric currents that help some people taste salt without having put salt in their food.
DON RELYEA: There was a dog wash that's like a laundry machine for a dog. If I were to put either of my dogs in there, it would traumatize them.
