Last week in San Diego, the Glia Interact conference was officially cleared for launch. Under the banner of "Above & Beyond", hundreds of pioneering leaders from community banks and credit unions gathered for a mission of fundamentally reshaping the future of financial services.

The message was clear: The era of conversational Voice AI is here.

The energy on the ground was palpable, fueled by key innovations and a community committed to using technology to be more human. For those didn't get to join the fun in San Diego, here are the four biggest things you missed:

⚖️ From Tradeoff to Liftoff: No More Choosing Between Efficiency and Experience

Glia CEO and co-founder Dan Michaeli kicked off Interact 2025 with the first mainstage session, challenging the audience to re-examine the financial industry's most persistent and costly problem: the forced choice between Efficiency (lowest cost) and Experience (highest quality). For decades, pursuing one meant sacrificing the other.

Dan introduced a powerful metaphor to explain how this "ultimate tradeoff" has finally been broken: the reusable rocket.

• The Problem: Sunk Cost. He detailed how, for 40 years of space exploration, traditional rockets represented a massive, fixed, and unscalable sunk cost, limiting ambition. Every mission, regardless of its goal, was prohibitively expensive because the rocket (the core mechanism) was thrown away after one use.
• The Breakthrough: Reusability. The innovation of the reusable Falcon 9 rocket shattered that paradigm. By lowering the cost per launch by over five times, it busted the tradeoff between the desire for exploration and the prohibitive cost. This created "Ultimate Possibilities" that were once unimaginable, such as space tourism and satellite internet.

The Reusable Rocket for Banking = AI for All™.

Dan asserted that Glia's AI Workforce serves as the reusable rocket for financial institutions, eliminating the sunk cost of human labor spent on simple, repetitive tasks. By automating these mundane interactions—which often represent 30-60% of total call volume—AI frees up massive capacity.

This newfound capacity gives leaders ultimate freedom and a historic choice, summarized by the three strategic options for reinvestment:

• Right-Size Operations: Strategically slow or stop backfilling agents who leave through natural attrition, reducing overall spend without layoffs.
• Reallocate to Growth: Invest resources into new areas, such as fraud prevention, business development, or creating new products and programs.
• Reinvest in People: Double down on service quality by focusing on high-value conversations, proactive outreach to grow loans or deposits, and increasing staff training.

Crucially, Dan highlighted that this shift serves as the "great equalizer". Community banks and credit unions can now equalize their cost structure with megabanks while actually enhancing the human connection and community bond that defines their brand. The new AI era, paradoxically, allows community institutions to become even more human.

🗣️ Introducing: The Industry’s Fastest, Most Human Voice AI

Monday afternoon, Glia’s Chief Product Officer Rei Kasai and Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Justin DiPietro unveiled Glia’s Next Generation Voice AI Platform. This breakthrough was engineered to conquer the latency problem that has historically made Voice AI sound "too robotic" to many, which has long prevented financial institutions from successfully moving high-volume customer calls to automation.

The Voice Glia Virtual Assistant (GVA) now delivers real-time responsiveness twice as fast as the next industry alternative, matching the natural, fluid pace of human conversation. This monumental innovation allows community banks and credit unions to deploy Voice AI that extends the personalized service that sets them apart. 

By successfully automating hundreds of the most common, repetitive phone requests end-to-end, Voice GVAs extend frontline capacity up to 70%—freeing staff to focus on relationship-building initiatives such as financial education, service accessibility, and community outreach.

Key highlights of the announcement include:

• Lifelike Voices: New AI voices offer near-human timing and greater emotional range, eliminating awkward pauses and significantly building customer confidence and trust.
• Zero AI Hallucinations: The platform is built on a foundation of Glia's Responsible AI, guaranteeing that only verified, policy-compliant information reaches customers, meeting the stringent security demands of banking.
• Advanced Noise Cancellation: Glia's Voice AI actively removes disruptive background noise and cross-talk to ensure accurate understanding in any environment.
• High-accuracy transcription: By delivering high-quality speech-to-text accuracy, Voice GVAs ensure banks and credit unions have reliable records of every interaction. 
• Flexible deployment: In addition to running natively on the Glia platform, Voice GVA can also now integrate directly into existing Call Center as a Service (CCaaS) environments, allowing banks and credit unions to use the #1 AI assistant for banking, regardless of their existing technology investments. 

🏆 Celebrating the Visionaries Going Above & Beyond

Tuesday's "Inspiration and Celebration" session honored the banks and credit unions at the vanguard of this transformation—our 2025 Catalyst Award Winners. These five institutions are proving that responsible AI deployment isn't just about efficiency; it's about strengthening the human connection that defines our industry.

As CEO Dan Michaeli said, they are actively using Glia's platform to "point cost and time savings toward building financial wellness and fostering deeper relationships in their communities".

A huge congratulations to the 2025 pioneers—the true heroes of our story:

• Banner Bank (The Harmonizer Award) 🏆: Honored for successfully unifying voice and digital service. Banner reduced average monthly call volume by 62% (from 49,000 to 18,700) and saw a 71% increase in answered phone engagements. They expanded service to 24/7/365 with AI Virtual Assistants, without increasing agent headcount, freeing their team to focus on complex interactions.
• TDECU (The Pacesetter Award) 🏆: Recognized for rapid time-to-impact and automating high-volume inquiries. TDECU achieved $688,460 in total annual savings and automated 15.3 FTEs of work by containing 59.1% of GVA interactions. This fundamentally shifted their agents' roles from reactive problem-solvers to proactive relationship-builders.
• Fibre Federal Credit Union (The Energizer Award) 🏆: Celebrated for channeling AI-driven savings into people and process improvements. Fibre FCU's AI tools saved over 2,780 hours and more than $104,000 in just seven months. These savings were strategically reinvested, shifting their leadership team from reactive support to proactively improving the member experience.
• Busey Bank (The Prodigy Award) 🏆: Awarded for standout performance in a complex environment, proving impact just 90 days post-launch during a major $7 billion bank conversion. They are handling more call volume than ever before with fewer associates, repurposing two Customer Care Advisor roles without adding headcount, and cutting their average post-call wrap-up time in half (from 42 seconds to 21 seconds) using AI.
• Heritage Federal Credit Union (The Visionary Award) 🏆: Honored for setting a scalable, member-centric model. Heritage FCU successfully reduced monthly labor requirements by 20% while handling double the interaction volume—all without adding headcount. With 90% of all member interactions being AI-enhanced, the capacity freed up helped their lending team drive a 63% increase in loan production.

🤝 A Community of Starfarers Filing Their Flight Plans

Interact 2025 brought together hundreds of banking and credit union leaders—the industry's true pioneers of customer experience—to connect and build new relationships. Interact is designed to be an unparalleled opportunity for peer-to-peer collaboration, and it’s always the highlight of the week. 

From the initial Launch Party to the final Glia Mission Re-entry Roundtables, the focus was on leaders sharing their real-world experience, success stories, and "AI flight plans" with one another. 

The energy was electric, confirming that community-focused financial institutions are not just adopting AI, they are leading the AI era by collaborating and amplifying their core mission—human connection. This collective energy proves that the next frontier is here, and the choice to achieve “Ultimate Possibilities” is now yours.

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