Artificial intelligence tools for financial planning professionals continue to grab headlines and drive discussion on social media, with many industry experts encouraging their peers to embrace AI or risk being left behind.
But many advisors remain skeptical about using AI, both personally and for their clients. And while the fiduciary framework under which they operate their businesses can give rise to some reservations, ignoring AI is an untenable choice.
So say three technology experts on a recent webcast hosted by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards. Firms using AI have a distinct competitive advantage, they agreed, and the performance and efficiency boost to be derived from AI tools is set to grow exponentially.
Speakers Andrew Altfest, founder and CEO of FP Alpha; Brooke Juniper, CEO of the AI investment platform Sage; and Apoorv Saxena, the former J.P. Morgan technology executive who now works at ObinAI, are working on different areas of AI development but agreed that AI tools and services will become indispensable for growth-oriented wealth managers.
From Skepticism to Interest
One topic covered on the webcast was the steps that firm leaders can take to win over AI-skeptical team members or those who simply haven’t begun to use the technology.
“Adoption is driven by advisors experiencing straightforward use cases where AI can show real value, and show it quickly,” Saxena said. “In the wealth management space, for example, AI-powered notetaking is very quickly catching on, and that’s because it’s easy and useful.”
Altfest and Juniper added that business leaders who use AI notetaking software can deploy it in meetings and later share the transcript, along with any post-event action items generated. In many cases, the skeptical advisors end up being surprised by the quality and actionable nature of the information produced.
That impression can then be used as an invitation for advisors to start “playing around” with somewhat more sophisticated but still easily approachable tools.
ChatGPT is a “perfect place to go next,” Juniper said. Open-source generative AI platforms might not immediately be integrated into the advisor’s process — and they probably shouldn’t be in most cases — but exploring the tools’ capabilities and potential drawbacks is a great learning opportunity.
Juniper suggested that advisors use multiple large language models to “get a sense of their unique personalities and quirks.”
Notably, in the panel’s experience, it is important for the firm’s top leaders to embrace AI tools like notetakers and other compliance-approved solutions — not just middle managers or team leaders.
“It’s about walking the walk and not just talking the talk on AI,” Saxena said.
Compelling Planning Opportunity
Over the long term, the panelists agreed, advisors are going to be interacting with AI tools whether they want to or not. That’s because the big wealth technology platform providers are integrating AI-based solutions directly into their processes and workflows.
As an example, Altfest detailed how the FP Alpha platform is using AI tools to help advisors go “way deeper” on such topics as estate tax and insurance planning. Today’s tools are able to scan and analyze documents at an incredible pace and scale, raising planning opportunities and flagging issues that advisors and clients should discuss.
“The power of AI democratizes planning services that used to be available only to the ultra-high-net-worth clientele and makes them accessible more broadly,” Altfest said. “In the old days, this kind of planning required us to pull all the data manually from the CRM and go through all their legal documents and directives. It’s just so time-consuming without the AI.”
Juniper echoed that sentiment.
“If you look at what you're doing in your wealth management practice, it’s all the repeatable and time-consuming processes that are ripe for positive AI disruption,” she said. “As these capabilities improve and become more common throughout the tools advisors use, we’re going to see a lot of that work automated.”
Human Plus Machine
Perhaps the most important strategy to confront AI skepticism, the panelists concluded, is instilling the idea that, as Juniper and Saxena repeatedly put it, “this is about human plus machine and not human being replaced by machine.”
To prove the point, they told the story of how AI tools have become a critical part of the radiology process in hospitals and doctor’s offices, following advances that earned one AI scientist a Nobel Prize in medicine in 2018.
That scientist predicted that human radiologists would disappear within a decade, but the story has turned out differently. In fact, there are now more radiologists than ever, and their performance at diagnosing internal illness and injury has never been better.
“What actually happened with the radiologists is that the combination of AI tools plus the human experts performed better than either the human or the technology alone,” Juniper said. “We think there’s a lot of reason to think a similar effect is coming for wealth management.”
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