AI is moving fast, and it's time for advisors to get on board.
That's the message this morning from Charles Morris, chief data scientist at Microsoft, who delivered the keynote session for the first day of ADVISE AI, Financial Planning's conference this week in Las Vegas.
"I've never seen financial services companies adopt a technology so quickly. The things that we have access to in the next couple of years are going to be incredible," Morris said. "It's not about if AI is going to be involved. It's about how we prioritize what we bring AI to."
The key, Morris said, is adopting quickly, but strategically.
"People are going to throw some really bad features out there and see if they stick. But the overall trend is that people are going to find the useful things," Morris said.
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There's no doubt that AI is becoming prevalent in not only wealth management, but in people's daily lives. Some statistics from Morris' presentation:
- 75% of knowledge workers are using AI in their jobs;
- 30 minutes are saved each day, equating to 10 hours a month, using Microsoft Co-Pilot;
- 65% of organizations are deriving business value from generative AI in 2024; and
- for every $1 invested in AI, there is a $3.50 return.
That rapid evolution, Morris said, means that people are not only adopting AI, but they've come to expect it to be part of their workflows. Working without advanced technology, at some point, will become almost unthinkable for these people.
"This is not dissimilar to the mobile movement. We're going to have every app reinvented with AI, as you're already starting to see," Morris said. "This is going to be much more tactical. You're going to feel like you're actually collaborating with an AI that is designed to make you better at your job. So, the scale should not be understated."
And that will only grow. Morris used Chat GPT-4 Turbo as an example. From March of 2024 to May of 2024, the OpenAI tool became six times faster, and its cost was cut to one-twelfth of what it had been.
"We change the way that we meet people, we network, we date, we buy groceries, we get taxis. That's all shifting, and we didn't know what that was going to look like when we started. AI is going to be like that but on a much more compressed time scale," Morris said. "We're going to build new apps that we can't imagine now."
