Co-founder of AI Startup Shares How AI-enabled UI Improves Experiences
Gaurav Mehra explains how AI-powered interfaces reduce friction in banking by simplifying customer journeys while keeping human judgment central to the experience.
Gaurav Mehra
Co-Founder and COO of Uptiq
Building for CX: Uptiq aims to improve banking operations by integrating AI, enhancing customer experience through efficient processes.
AI Operations: AI enables banks to redesign inefficient onboarding and back-office tasks, increasing service speed and personalization.
Fluid UI: Uptiq's fluid UI simplifies data entry for customers, significantly improving application efficiency and satisfaction.
Executive Support: Successful AI adoption in banks requires early executive buy-in and team education to alleviate job-related fears.
Redesigning Journey: AI allows for highly personalized customer journeys, enabling staff to focus on relationship-building rather than paperwork.
Gaurav Mehra is the co-founder and COO of Uptiq, a company that is leveraging AI to transform how banks operate behind the scenes and, as a result, how they serve customers. His previous roles include VP of Customer Success.
We sat down with Gaurav to get a sense of how AI enables higher-quality experiences for customers in the banking industry. Here's what he said.
Building for CX
I'm Gaurav Mehra, COO at Uptiq. My background mixes operating and investing, with two decades building and scaling companies at the intersection of operations and technology.
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In industries relying on operational decisions — like banking, lending, insurance, or any field where people review risk and creditworthiness — I consistently see the same pattern. Organizations spend billions on technology, yet their people still perform all manual work. Front-line teams retype customer applications.
Reviewers build approval packages from PDFs scattered across systems that don't communicate. Analysts swivel between five screens to answer a single question.
Technology was supposed to handle the connective tissue. It never did, so humans became the bridge. Uptiq exists to solve this problem. We are building toward a straightforward future, where financial and credit decisions are fast, personal, and accessible for every customer, in every interaction, with every decision.
We achieve this by engineering an AI workforce of domain-trained agents that handle operational work, allowing people to apply judgment instead of managing paperwork.
That's the company. Regarding my role, I don't run a traditional CX organization. I run the operational engine of a company whose product reshapes customer experience for institutions that move money, extend credit, and evaluate risk.
Uptiq works with 150+ banks, credit unions, non-bank lenders, fintechs, and organizations reviewing business and consumer risk. Our AI agents operate within workflows touching nearly every customer-facing moment: account opening, applications, onboarding, ongoing monitoring, and the digital experience.
The CX I focus on occurs across millions of touch points, and it transforms as agents remove friction from those moments.
The underlying platform makes this work, allowing regulated institutions to deploy AI agents for customer-impacting decisions. Uptiq's Qore AI Platform is purpose-built for this world. It features domain-trained agents that execute on the documents and workflows they handle, are audited and explainable, and include governance, security, and policy controls built in from day one rather than bolted on.
This differentiates it from a generic AI tool and makes it something a Chief Risk Officer or Chief Compliance Officer will sign off on.
How AI can redesign CX and operations
I believe AI allows institutions to redesign onboarding, origination, and back-office operations that were built for an era of primitive systems and swivel-chair processes…The AI era allows recomposing these systems without these constraints.
I believe AI allows institutions to redesign onboarding, origination, and back-office operations that were built for an era of primitive systems and swivel-chair processes.
These processes were designed to circumvent the limitations of existing systems and the working-hour limitations of humans serving them.
The AI era allows recomposing these systems without these constraints. You can offer personalized service at scale, collapsing onboarding flows into minutes and hours. And back-office agents can run 24/7 monitoring for risk and compliance exceptions. Humans can then focus on what matters, not just feeding the machines.
How AI-enabled fluid UI can change customer experience
One core change we delivered in our software is a fluid UI that completely moves away from form-based data entry. It's a game-changer for customers.
Legacy interfaces force customers through rigid workflows — in our case, entering innumerable fields, attaching documents in specific places, and rekeying information the bank should already know.
AI agents, on the other hand, can access data at the bank and across the internet. They can also be trained on a domain and a company's policies. In our case, bank lending policies. And they can understand document content.
As a result, our user experience now asks users for only a few bits of information, either through a chatbot or a dynamic form with minimal fields embedded in the bank's usual portals. The agents can parse bulk uploads, check for data completeness, and fill gaps with internal and external data sources. If anything is still missing, it can ask for it on the spot with another dynamically-generated fluid UI.
Any software company can do this, and the impact on a customer's experience is immense. We found a 32-40% increase in efficiency in origination flows for complex commercial loans, resulting in fewer customer drop-offs during the application process. Qualitatively, these efficiencies seem to make customers happier, with anecdotally better experiences and customer delight.
A real-world workflow for turning product enhancement into customer enablement
We use an AI-enabled workflow for turning every product enhancement into accurate customer enablement, fast. New capabilities only create value once customers can adopt them, so documentation and enablement are a CX function for us, not an afterthought.
Here is the end-to-end flow.
- Capture the source: Release notes, engineering changelogs, recorded demos, and internal walkthroughs feed in as raw material.
- Draft the content: We use AI to generate first-pass documentation, release notes, and enablement guides from those sources.
- Check accuracy: We cross-reference each draft against the source material and actual product behavior, then flag gaps, stale references, and inconsistencies.
- Review with humans: Product and technical experts verify accuracy, compliance, and brand voice.
- Publish and enable: Approved content ships to the docs site and teams as customer-ready enablement.
Why embedded fluid UI outperforms chatbots
Originally, we thought the chatbot was the "new universal interface," but that idea exploded as we worked with our institutional customers in the last 18 months. We learned that embedded fluid UIs with a little more structure lead to far better user experiences. And they can be paired with a more open-ended chatbot as an accessible assistant on the side for information, support, or ad-hoc questions.
The reason that embedded fluid UI is a better experience is that "visible AI" like chatbots gives the message, "You're not important enough, you're being left to the machines." In the case of our institutional customers, a chatbot that suggests applying for a line of credit (LOC) generates a negative and impersonal vibe.
Instead, imagine that same AI agent serving invisibly and sending the exact same LOC offer as a push notification: "Bob, your relationship manager, Jerry, analyzed your cash flow and feels you will be well-served by an LOC. Can he give you a call next week?"
That's a different experience.
Why executive support and education are vital to AI adoption
Never skip the fear. Most resistance to AI comes down to one quiet worry: “Is this going to take my job?” The truth we point to is that AI lifts the manual grind off people’s plates and frees them to spend their judgment where it actually matters. It makes the work better. It doesn’t replace the person.
Like any project, executive impetus and team buy-in from the teams that will use the systems most are always the most important ingredients.
Leadership sets the priority, clears the budget, and smooths the cross-team friction. But that only gets you so far if the team on the ground is uneasy about what AI means for them.
So, we always encourage institutions to start the education early. AI is moving fast, and if you leave gaps, people fill them with assumptions. Bring teams into the conversation from the first planning cycles, not at launch, so they understand how AI is being considered and why it shows up in a given workflow.
When they get that, the trust comes naturally. Back it with genuine enablement, show people how to use the tools well, and they start taking ownership instead of just tolerating the change.
Never skip the fear. Most resistance to AI comes down to one worry: Is this going to take my job? The truth we point to is that AI lifts the manual grind off people's plates and frees them to spend their judgment where it actually matters. It makes the work better. It doesn't replace the person. Once a team sees that for themselves, buy-in stops being something you have to push for.
Why CX leaders must redesign the customer journey with AI
Customers have always wanted the same things. They want to deal with someone who knows their name. Someone who seems to care about them. Good service is always personal. It anticipates needs and makes the customer feel important.
AI is just the next step on the journey to deliver that experience. Agents can work 24/7, so our people avoid being buried in operations or paperwork, freeing them to build relationships and serve customers. Agents can scale to millions of customers and help deliver highly personal journeys.
The tools now offer enormous possibilities. The key is designing the journey, the interfaces, and the balance between AI and human input so customers feel like they are dining in a Michelin-star restaurant, not buying a Coke from a vending machine.
Follow along
You can follow Gaurav Mehra's work on LinkedIn. And check out Uptiq.
More expert interviews to come on The CX Lead!
