Lili CTO Liran Zelkha on building AI that disappears

The fintech industry has spent the better part of the last two years racing to add AI to its products. Chatbots have been bolted onto banking dashboards. Summaries have been appended to transaction histories. Assistants have materialized inside apps that users open, at best, once a week. Liran Zelkha, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Lili, a financial platform built for small business owners, thinks most of this activity is pointed in the wrong direction. Zelkha has spent years thinking carefully about the relationship between technology and small business owners: customers who are skilled at their craft, pressed for time, and rarely interested in learning a new interface. This customer profile has shaped the architecture of Lili from the beginning, and it informs Zelkha’s view of where AI in finance could genuinely move the needle: The goal is not a better in-app AI experience. The goal is to make a company’s financial capabilities available through whatever AI the customer has already chosen to trust. “The business owner shouldn’t have to learn our app to get value from us,” Zelkha says. “They should be able to ask their AI companion about their cash flow and get a real answer, backed by Lili.” …