For financial advisors embedded in traditional portfolio management in a highly regulated field, it's easy to get mystified by new, complex algorithms and cutting-edge technologies like AI. Plus, some new AI tools are harder to learn than they are to use.
That's partly why larger firms like Merrill Wealth Management and Morgan Stanley are starting with automated tools that are simple in nature but also the most useful: they might schedule a meeting, take meeting notes or draft summaries with action plans between the advisor and client.
Most recently, Merrill launched a scheduling app that helps advisors send a link to their clients who can then see the advisor's calendar and instantly book or change an appointment and set reminders. The firm estimates it saves teams more than 75,000 hours per year by removing an average of 18 minutes of back-and-forth to schedule an appointment and automating it to roughly two minutes.
"What I like to say when I'm talking about this to the field is that if I have to call the doctor for an appointment … I actually won't go because I'm too busy," said Inez Louzonis, head of platforms and capabilities at Merrill. "It has to be digital, and our clients are no different than that. So why can't, in financial services, we have that same experience for our clients — making it easy so that they can choose how they want to interact with us."
Merrill's digital scheduler is not necessarily AI-powered like some other AI tools they use, but it is a new digital tool similar to the emergence of digital schedulers marketed to the public like Calendly and OnceHub — also tools increasingly used by advisors.
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"Calendly is definitely a game changer," said Randy Carver, president and CEO of Carver Financial Services and registered principal at Raymond James Financial. "It's actually probably one of the top three pieces of software we use."
A 2024 study by Orion found that 45% of the 542 advisors surveyed said technology would save them the most time in operations and administrative tasks compared to 12% who said it would help investment management training. Some of that disparity has to do with trust. Advisors new to AI are more likely to try it out with back-office tasks like scheduling before testing it with making financial predictions or consumer-facing interactions.
A Financial Planning survey of financial advisors performed earlier this year found that about half of the 127 respondents said they'd trust AI to be responsible for making predictions on their car or house maintenance needs, but only 15% said they'd trust it to make financial recommendations.
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Another leading AI developer, Morgan Stanley, in late June released its
"We envision a world where AI serves as an efficiency enhancing interaction layer that sits between our colleagues and the many applications they interact with such as execution and order entry, CRMs, reporting tools and risk analysis, just to name a few," Jeff McMillan, head of Firmwide Artificial Intelligence at Morgan Stanley, said in the announcement. "Through this rollout, financial advisors continue to see first-hand the real benefits GenAI delivers to their practices. And we're just getting started in unlocking the true power of this technology for all of Morgan Stanley."
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More broadly, the wealth management industry is just getting started with AI. The most common applications so far, like scheduling and note-taking, are the easy pickings when models like CoPilot can do more with automated note-taking, said John O'Connell, founder and CEO of The Oasis Group, a Monroe Township, New Jersey-based technology consultant for wealth managers and fintech firms.
"While these solutions are picking off the low-hanging fruit, the advisor CoPilots are most interesting," he said. "The CoPilot applications can combine data from your CRM and meetings to generate agendas for upcoming client reviews based on all the meeting notes from the past client meetings. The data from similar clients may be used in the future to generate agendas with new items, or next best actions, to discuss with your client."
In July, JPMorgan Chase launched a more comprehensive form of AI called Quest IndexGPT that uses OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM) to generate specific keywords which then builds thematic indices directly for institutional investors. It's the first time JPMorgan is using an LLM to back a client-facing offering, creeping further into how AI can be used to assist in making financial decisions.
"We are missing the mark in considering that AI cannot make financial decisions," O'Connell said.
"Gen Z prospective clients do not meet many firm's minimums today and will use AI to guide their investing. These investors will have little need for financial advisors when they inherit wealth from their parents if they've used AI to manage their investments for years," he explained. "This should be a wake-up call for wealth managers to learn AI today and use it to deliver better and more service to their clients and their heirs in order to protect their firm."
