The Action Layer Episode 1: Maya Mikhailov, Founder and CEO of Savvi AI
Atomic Team
The Action Layer is a video interview series from Atomic exploring the space between fintech ideas and real-world outcomes. At SF Fintech Week, Atomic CEO and Co-Founder Jordan Wright sat down with founders, investors, and operators to discuss what's actually working, what's breaking in practice, and what it takes to turn innovation into real impact. New episodes drop weekly — follow along on YouTube.
Most financial institutions are already using AI. The question Maya Mikhailov wants them to ask is: who owns it?
Maya is the founder and CEO of Savvi AI, and before that she spent years building AI inside Synchrony Financial. Her view is direct — banks are outsourcing the intelligence that makes them different, and by the time they realize it, getting it back will cost them.
In this episode, Jordan and Maya get into what that actually means in practice. The difference between renting AI for utilities like chatbots and owning the models that drive real decisions. Why the much-discussed OpenAI-Plaid partnership is less about banking and more about who ends up sitting between a financial institution and its own customers. And why a decade of dashboards gave banks a picture of the past but left them without the tools to act on what's coming next.
The conversation also gets into the harder questions. When does AI in banking stop being an efficiency play and start being a better customer experience? What does agentic AI actually look like inside a regulated institution? And if you can predict which customers are about to leave, what does it take to do something about it before they do?
In this episode:
- 00:01:32 — Why banks need to own their decisioning models, not rent them
- 00:04:02 — "It's important to own what makes you different"
- 00:05:53 — The AI hype problem and why overselling creates burned buyers
- 00:09:12 — Does AI embed banking, or does banking embed AI?
- 00:11:09 — The real threat behind the OpenAI-Plaid partnership
- 00:15:32 — Why dashboards gave banks the past but not the future
- 00:16:35 — Why chatbots aren't the answer and the Netflix model for invisible AI
- 00:18:15 — Operational efficiency vs. customer experience
- 00:21:19 — What the action layer actually looks like inside a bank
- 00:22:26 — Agentic AI in a regulated environment
- 00:27:03 — Real examples of AI closing the loop for consumers
- 00:35:03 — What great AI looks like when it's working
About Maya Mikhailov
Maya Mikhailov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Savvi AI, an end-to-end platform enabling FinServ and FinTech teams to build and deploy custom AI/ML models without custom infrastructure. A serial entrepreneur, she previously co-founded the retail-tech firm GPShopper, which was acquired by Synchrony in 2017, where she later served as SVP.
