Bio:

Brent Dixon guides leaders through strategic crossroads. He works with credit unions and community financial institutions across North America to align teams, chart growth paths, and ship results. He publishes AI for FIs, a weekly newsletter tracking agentic AI for financial institutions. 

He founded Dixon Strategic Labs and co-founded Trabian Technology, a fintech studio serving banks and credit unions. At the Filene Research Institute, he managed a two-year innovation leadership program for senior executives and built the organization’s first commercial research model. He created the first innovation unit built to serve the UN Secretariat and deployed a mobile resource center serving 4,000 refugees during the 2016 Greece crisis. He was a Future of Finance Teaching Fellow at Singularity University.

Brent lives in Oakland, California with his son and a bossy cat named Bug.

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Speaking Topics:

Available as a keynote (45-60 min), breakout (60-90 min), or workshop (90 min to half-day), in-person or virtual. For executives, boards, senior staff, and emerging leaders at credit unions, community banks, and cooperative institutions.

Making Agentic AI Happen

This hands-on session moves from “what is agentic AI” to the practical work of making it happen. Whether your team is launching a first experiment, planning a pilot, or building out an AI strategy for the year ahead, you’ll leave with a concrete path forward.

You will leave with:

• A clear framework for deciding when agentic AI is the right tool (and when it’s not)
• A phased approach to safe experimentation, from sandbox to scale
• Governance building blocks your leadership team can adapt immediately
• Real examples from credit unions already seeing results

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AI for FIs: What’s Real, What’s Noise, and What to Do About It

What’s happening with agentic AI at banks and credit unions right now? This session walks through real deployments, the gap between the hype and what’s working, and the questions leadership teams are wrestling with. Built on Brent’s weekly research for his AI for FIs newsletter, the talk evolves with the industry. No two versions are quite the same.

You will leave with:

• Three current through-lines reshaping AI in financial services, with concrete examples from named institutions
• A working sense of what’s deployable now versus what’s still vendor hype
• Board-relevant questions to ask your team about AI authorization, governance, and member-facing risk

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Using AI as a Strategic Thought Partner

How leaders use AI to sharpen their own thinking, not delegate it. A practical session on the difference between AI that replaces judgment and AI that improves it, with hands-on time using AI tools to interrogate strategic decisions in real time.

You will leave with:

• Working prompts for stress-testing strategic plans, board memos, and difficult decisions
• A clearer sense of when to use AI as a thought partner vs. when to put it away
• A small set of habits that compound as your AI fluency grows

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The Future of Finance: The Evolution of Money, Data, and Trust

Consumer finance is at a turning point. The next two years will reset how money moves, how data is shared, and how trust is earned. Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed for stability over speculation, are moving into a clear federal framework that could change payments, settlement, and treasury. Open banking will give members more control over their data and open new competition. Real-time payments are spreading, creating better member experiences and fresh fraud risks.

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Innovation & Impact Through 1000 Tiny Experiments

Risk-averse institutions can innovate without betting the farm. Experimentation isn’t a methodology to import. It’s a mode of operation. Brent walks through how to build that muscle: small, strategic tests that minimize cost, surface what’s working, and let leadership act in uncertainty. The session is built around real examples and the questions that move teams forward.

You will leave with:

• How to build a culture of experimentation that lives beyond a single team or initiative
• A clear cycle for designing, running, and learning from small experiments
• Real examples from a range of organizations, with specific lessons you can take back to your team

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Cooperation Among Cooperatives: Collective Problem-Solving Retitled

Complex problems demand collective approaches. By bringing together diverse groups of people, data, and technology, cooperative institutions can build a greater collective intelligence than any individual part in isolation. Built on the cooperative DNA most credit unions already carry, this interactive workshop turns shared expertise into a working capacity for tackling problems no single organization can solve alone.

You will leave with:

• A method for surfacing what your team and members already know about a complex problem
• A way to make decisions together that draws on data, lived experience, and dissenting views
• A facilitation pattern your leadership team can run on its own after the session