Hey, fintech fam 💜

It is officially SUMMER (June 21st!) ☀️

And of course, I did the most New York summer thing you can think of and hit Rockaway Beach this weekend.

Because if you didn’t know: NYC is a beach town. And the greatest city in the world. And your current NBA champs (who knows how long we will be able to say that, okay? 😆)

Today, I’m sharing a warning that Bread Financial’s VP of Product is issuing to fintech leaders about AI.

And it’s not about AI replacing humans at work. It’s something much quieter that most people aren’t talking about.

Let's get into it. ✨

"I hope we don't lose the ability to think critically."

Jyoti Menon said this to me recently on the Humans of Fintech podcast. She was talking about AI, specifically how we use AI at work and in our personal lives. 

This is a warning that every person using AI should heed. Menon is VP of Product at Bread Financial, and she has been building at the intersection of finance and payments longer than the industry had a name for it. 

When she was a student learning in college classrooms, Apple Pay didn't exist. The iPhone didn't exist. 

She still went on to build Apple Pay at Citibank in 2014. The job she built her entire career around wasn't a job while she was in college. 

But she got there because she knew how to think. 

And now she's watching fintech move faster than perhaps any other industry toward agentic AI adoption, wondering whether the people building it are protecting that same capacity to think for themselves. 

The concern about AI across industries is almost always framed as a jobs question. Menon's worry runs deeper than headcount. 

She's watching the habits of mind gradually erode as AI use becomes commonplace. The same critical thinking skills that make good fintech product decisions possible in the first place.

She's seen it play out at work already. Someone drops a question into an AI tool, accepts the output, and moves on without interrogating whether the answer is calibrated to their company, their customer, or their specific context. 

"AI might say these are the three steps to take, but they're not relevant to where you work," she said. The output looks complete, but the thinking behind it is borrowed from AI’s compilation of content it can access online.

Research from global studies on AI adoption is beginning to name this dynamic more precisely. 

What's emerging is de-skilling. It’s not one person outsourcing their thinking, but hundreds of people across an organization doing it simultaneously. 

So what happens to the institutional knowledge and thinking patterns organizations have been relying on for years when people are de-skilling en masse?

The skills most at risk are exactly the ones financial services require most: problem framing, causal reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, and the ability to know which question to ask before reaching for an answer. 

In fintech, where the stakes of a wrong decision are measured in consumer trust, regulatory exposure, and real people's financial lives, the loss of critical thinking puts entire industries and consumers at serious risk.

For Menon, the antidote lives in the work itself. By treating prompting as the rigorous, context-dependent craft it actually is.

"As I think about prompting, that's what's important," she said. "What story are you telling? How do you set the context? That's like writing a paper."

A well-constructed prompt (one that gives an AI tool the full context of your company, your competitors, your customer base, and the specific problem you're trying to solve) requires exactly the kind of structured thinking that produces good product decisions with or without AI. 

This is also where Menon connects AI to something she learned much earlier in her career, launching Apple Pay at Citi. 

The technology was sophisticated, the brand was powerful, and the habit still didn't change: not until the entire ecosystem moved together. Issuers, networks, merchants, and even the New York City subway. 

Agentic AI in financial services is going to work the same way. The fraud frameworks, the liability standards, the regulatory guardrails — none of that exists yet at the speed AI is moving. 

"What if I did an automatic purchase and then I call the bank and say, 'Oh, that wasn't me, the AI did it,'" she told me. "What are the rules around that?" 

Fintech has to be in that room helping build the answers, because the technology companies driving AI forward are not going to want to carry the regulatory burden. 

"They might be the drivers," said Menon, "but in order to really enable financial services features, you have to work with us."

Menon's warning extends specifically to senior leaders who are watching their teams experiment with AI from a comfortable distance. 

"I really hope leaders lean in to learn and really be in the weeds with the team, because if you don't understand it, you're going to be left behind," she warned.

Her own response at Bread Financial has been to run an informal pod with a small group of product managers, meeting almost every week just to see what they're trying to do. 

One team member figured out how to use AI to work through data in Snowflake independently. Another drafted a full context prompt for Bread Financial that the whole team could share. 

Neither happened because a mandate came from leadership, but because the culture made it safe to experiment, and Menon was in the room asking questions alongside her team.

There is a longer-term concern underneath this one that she raises carefully. 

As AI absorbs more of the foundational work through which junior employees have traditionally built judgment, like research, drafting, and problem decomposition, it begs the question of how the next generation of fintech leaders will develop their skills.

"A lot of what I know is because I've been in the industry a long time," she said on Humans of Fintech. "I wonder what's going to happen where more of the basic learning is AI versus getting into Excel." 

The institutions that figure out how to preserve that learning path will be the ones that compound their talent over time while staying current with AI’s impact. 

Keep in mind, none of this is an argument against AI. Menon is clear about that, and so is the industry's trajectory. 

Adoption across financial services is accelerating, the use cases are real, and the efficiency gains available to teams that learn to use these tools well are significant. The question was never whether to build with AI. It's whether the people building with it are thinking carefully enough about what they're trusting it with.

"We have to think about the ‘so what’ of it," Menon told me. "It's great to be curious about what's happening in the market, but always think about the so what for your business."

That is the standard Menon is holding herself and her team to, and it's the one the industry needs to bring to San Francisco this fall. 

FTW: San Francisco is happening September 29th-October 1st, around the thesis that fintech owns the agentic AI narrative. 

The most consequential deployments of agentic AI are happening inside the infrastructure that moves money and serves real people under real regulatory scrutiny. 

The leaders in that room will be the ones deciding what it looks like, which means they need to show up with the critical thinking skills to match the ambition.

The tools are here. The question Menon is asking is whether we are.

Three summits. Three days. One belief: fintech doesn't ask big tech for a seat at the table. It sets the table.

After all, AI only matters if it improves people’s financial lives.

After 600 attendees, 75 side events, and rooms that closed deals and built partnerships at FTW: NYC — we're taking everything we learned to the West Coast.

Early bird tickets are on sale now.

If you care about fintech adopting AI in a sustainable way that makes everyone money (and keeps our thinking skills intact), then I’ll see you there! 💜

Cheetah Girls 4 is rumored to start filming in July… we can only hope the bops are as good as the first 3 movies. The nostalgia is real!

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Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜