Your Next Hire May Not Be Human: How Community Credit Unions Are Rebuilding Capacity Without Adding Headcount

Before I joined Saris, I spent almost ten years working at two credit unions. I have sat in the meetings where a VP of Lending explains they need three more processors to keep up with volume, and the CFO asks whether we have the budget. I have watched teams stay until 8pm to clear a backlog and come back the next morning to a stack that has already grown. If you have worked at a community credit union, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Which is why my recent conversation with Chase Clelland, SVP of People and AI at Grow Financial Federal Credit Union, reframed something for me that I didn't realize was still stuck.

Chase said something on our webinar that I have been thinking about since:

"Your next hire may not be human."

While his statement might read as provocative, he’s actually being practical.

The four ways your credit union actually gets work done

Chase's team at Grow Financial is thinking about workforce planning in a different way. Instead of talking about total cost of labor, which only counts human employees, they have moved to what he calls “total cost of work.” Work at a credit union can be done by four categories of resources:

• Human employees, the actual humans doing the judgment calls, having the member conversations, and everything that only a person can do
• Digital employees, AI agents doing the manual work that enables that judgment and relationship work
• Outsourced partners, vendors handling specialized work outside your core competency
• Offshore capacity, for work where the cost and complexity math makes sense

Traditional headcount planning only measures the first one. That is the box every strategic plan lives inside now: how many bodies can we afford to hire this year to keep up with growth?

Chase reframes this box completely. When you can produce work through four channels instead of one, growth stops being constrained by how many people you can hire. It becomes a question of how you allocate work across the four categories most effectively.

How Chase is seeing the future

The most striking moment of the webinar for me was when Chase shared what he calls his “Nirvana state” for Grow Financial:

‍"If we could have 620 team members out in the community building relationships and building our assets rather than working in the back office, that would be a hell of a thing."

That is a credit union CEO's dream. A team of 620 people whose entire day is spent serving members, deepening relationships, and building the community the credit union exists to serve. This is not about eliminating jobs. It is about reallocating human capacity toward the work only humans can do, and letting AI handle the mechanical work that fills up too much of an employee's day today.

At Grow Financial, that is already starting to happen. Their consumer lending funding team is targeting a shift from 8 funders down to 4, not because they are cutting staff, but because the four remaining funders can absorb the volume the eight used to carry. The other four are available to be redeployed elsewhere in the credit union, coach newer employees, or take on the higher-complexity work that used to sit at the bottom of everyone's pile.

This is not doing more with less - it’s about doing more of the right work with the same people.

What this makes possible for members

Here is what I keep coming back to, having spent almost nine years in credit unions myself. The reason a member chooses a credit union over Chase or Wells Fargo is not rates. It is not products. It's the fact that when they call, someone who actually knows them and their specific needs picks up the phone.

That relationship is what makes credit unions worth choosing. And that relationship is what gets squeezed when your back-office team is buried in document review, income calculations, and system-to-system reconciliation.

Every hour of back-office work AI can absorb is an hour a human on your team can spend with a member. That is the mission story hiding inside every capacity conversation at a credit union.

Chase also discussed how quickly his team got past the initial validation phase. In the first week, funders were double-checking every AI output, trying to confirm the agent was really doing what they thought it was. By the end of that week, they had confirmed enough loans and started trusting the system. And then something interesting happened. His team started asking, "What's next? What else can we do?"

Nancy Kreisle, a senior funder at Grow Financial, put it plainly: "I personally am probably funding at least 30 percent faster than normal, at least."

That is the compound outcome. Members get served better, team members get more of their expertise applied to the work that matters, and growth stops being blocked by hiring capacity. The strategic plan stops carrying the invisible tax of headcount ramp on every growth commitment.

What it takes to get there

Chase's advice to a peer credit union leader who is just starting this journey came down to a few things:

• Begin earlier than you think you need to
• Understand where your data lives and how your workflows actually run before you buy AI
• Bring your risk, compliance, and information security teams in from day one
• Think about the exit plan before you sign anything, because you do not want to build efficiency around a partnership and then lose it

The credit unions that will get the most from this shift over the next few years are the ones treating it as a strategic capability, not a productivity tool. And the ones that recognize a simple truth Chase named on the webinar:

"AI is here to augment you, not replace you."

The work that requires a human is the work only humans can do. Everything else–the reading, the comparing, the copying, the routing, the reconciling–is work your credit union will eventually stop paying human capacity to perform.

Your next hire may not be human - and your members may end up better served because of it.