Don't Retire. Rewire. — AI for People Who Refuse to Nod, Part 4 Here's a secret about AI vendor meetings: the smartest person in the room isn't the one who knows the most jargon. It's the one who asks the best questions. I learned this the fun way — by nodding along for years and then doing the homework. These ten questions will make you look like the most prepared buyer at the table, and they'll make your AI projects more likely to succeed, not less. 1. Where does my data go

Everything in this series comes down to one question: what will you do about it? Here's my answer — a 90-day action plan to get excited about your career again. Not a transformation program. A rewiring.

Governance isn't the enemy of innovation; it's what makes innovation survivable. Banks learned this with every technology wave: the institutions that thrived were the ones that paired bold experimentation with disciplined controls. AI is no different — except the stakes are higher and the black boxes are shinier.

What you need instead is fluency, not technical depth. Fluency means knowing what AI is good at and where it reliably goes wrong. It means recognizing when the training data doesn't match your portfolio, when the confidence score is theater, and when the model is confidently hallucinating in the middle of your risk report.

Open the chatbots, the copilots, the document summarizers, and start using them on your real work — the credit memo you're drafting, the policy you're reviewing, the client briefing you're preparing. Fluency comes from reps, not reading.

here's a story the world likes to tell about people like me. You've been in banking for decades, you're approaching the end of your career, and the sensible move is to wind down gracefully while the machines take it from here. I have a different plan: I'm rewiring