Season 3 of the FMI Podcast arrives at a moment when AI is no longer a side topic - it’s becoming the organising logic of how financial services will operate, compete and grow. And as we prepare to publish Bank 2030: Rise of Intelligent Marketing Systems with Final Upgrade AI, it felt right to open the season with the person who has been living this shift at full velocity: Dominique Rose Van‑Winther, CEO of Final Upgrade AI.

Dominique doesn’t talk about AI in abstractions. She talks about workflows, capability uplift, organisational rewiring - and the fact that many teams are still treating AI as a set of tools rather than a new way of working. Her story, and her worldview, offer a preview of what intelligent marketing systems will demand from FS leaders over the next decade.

Finding the Time to Embrace Change

Dominique’s path into AI wasn’t planned. After years in senior Marcoms and operations roles across IPG and WPP - most recently as Head of Operations for Weber Shandwick Asia Pacific - she left to build a consultancy focused on technology empowerment and automation.

“One month later, ChatGPT launched,” she says. “and I had something very few people had at that moment: time.”

While most leaders were still trying to understand what generative AI even was, Dominique was spending 10–20 hours a week experimenting, breaking things, rebuilding them, and mapping how AI could reshape real workflows. That early immersion became the foundation of Final Upgrade AI - now one of the most in‑demand training and advisory firms globally.

Today she spends 80% of the year travelling, delivering keynotes, workshops and executive sessions from Switzerland to Singapore to the Middle East.

Why Most AI Training Doesn’t Work

Dominique is disarmingly direct about the problem with most AI education.

“People go to LinkedIn Learning or Coursera, but it’s all philosophical. It’s like studying AI from four years ago.”

Her approach is the opposite: solve real problems, in real time, using real workflows. Instead of teaching features, she drops teams into a live brief and has them complete three months of work in five hours. The speed is impressive, but the real breakthrough is cognitive.

Leaders consistently tell her that their teams remain fully engaged - that AI is accelerating their thinking rather than replacing it. Individuals want the time‑saving benefits of AI but worry about being judged for using it. Leaders push for adoption but fear losing the critical thinking that makes their teams valuable. And organisations, still shaped by legacy tools and fragmented data, often pull people back into old habits.

Dominique’s work sits in that tension - showing teams what it feels like to think with AI, not hand over the thinking to it.

The Prompt Myth - and the Real Skill Marketers Need

One of her most liberating ideas is also one of the simplest:
“Throw prompts out the window.”

The belief that there is a perfect, reusable prompt doesn’t match the reality of marketing work. Instead, she teaches iterative, conversational problem‑solving - the equivalent of sitting around a table with “five really smart PhD students who know nothing about your business.”

Your job becomes to provide context, make decisions, combine ideas and guide the system toward outcomes. It’s a fundamentally different way of working - and one that marketers are well‑placed to adapt to and adopt.

The External Research Advantage

Marketers spend 30–40% of their time hunting for insights: competitor positioning, media coverage, customer sentiment, journalist behaviour, category trends. Most of that can now be automated or accelerated using AI tools that sit outside the organisation’s compliance perimeter.

“Research is where marketers can move fastest,” she says. “You can use external tools aggressively, then bring the insights back into your internal ecosystem.”

This is where FS marketers have a genuine competitive edge: they can use AI boldly for research without touching sensitive data.

Personalisation at a Level FS Has Never Seen

If there’s one theme that will define the next two years, it’s hyper‑personalisation - not the superficial kind, but deep, structural personalisation across products, journeys and experiences.

Dominique is already seeing this in the wild. Some firms can now dynamically reconfigure entire app experiences based on user needs. Others are building AI‑driven systems that tailor marketing materials for ultra‑high‑net‑worth clients with a level of specificity that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

She describes one project where AI analysed each client’s portfolio, identified opportunities, and generated bespoke materials for a VIP programme - all while navigating confidentiality and compliance constraints.

“It finally matched the expectations these clients already had,” she says. “That’s where the industry is heading.”

What’s next? AI as the engine of personalised value creation, not just personalised messaging.

AI Agents and the Coming Workflow Revolution

Dominique is clear that the age of standalone AI tools is already behind us; the next wave is defined by AI agents capable of taking on meaningful, multi‑step work.

“Most companies think they’re using agents,” she says, “but what they’re doing is a tiny fraction of what’s coming.”

The next phase will see autonomous systems take on work previously considered “too human to automate.” The organisations preparing for this shift are mapping workflows end‑to‑end, building internal data foundations, training teams to collaborate with agents, and designing governance that enables experimentation.

Those who ignore it will be caught on the hop.

The Fat Coach Principle - and Why It Matters for FS Leaders

One of the most memorable moments in the conversation is Dominique’s “fat coach principle.”

“You don’t go to an overweight coach to be made fit.”

If you’re advising on AI, you must be the most AI‑empowered person in the room. It’s why she built her own CRM over the Christmas holidays - not because she had to, but because she wanted to prove what’s possible when you fully commit to intelligent systems.

The result was a bespoke platform built in weeks, not months, at a fraction of the cost of traditional SaaS.

“Software as we know it is dying,” she says. “If you can build what you need in four to six weeks, why would you pay six‑figure subscriptions?”

This mindset - experimental, hands‑on, unapologetically ambitious - is exactly what FS leaders will need as intelligent marketing systems become the norm.

Conclusion

Dominique’s episode is a fitting way to open Season 3: a reminder that the forces reshaping financial services don’t sit neatly in one discipline. AI is part of the story - but so are the shifts in customer behaviour, financial technology, regulation, distribution and leadership that we’ll explore throughout the season. Her perspective sets the stage for a year of conversations about how FS marketers can build smarter, more adaptive organisations in a rapidly changing world.

If you would like to hear more, or see a preview of the new Bank 2030: The Rise of Intelligent Marketing Systems paper, just drop us a line at jacobhoward@financialmarketinginsights.com