Marc Butler started his week by catching up with an advisor who had wrapped a client meeting just 10 minutes prior.
Butler watched as the advisor gathered and organized notes taken down by pen and pad; quickly typed them up on his computer; and pasted those notes into the pilot program of Butler's new AI-powered idea.
In just moments, those notes were turned into follow-up correspondence that recapped the most important parts of the client meeting and suggested some key action items. A few edits later, that advisor — completed follow-up client letter in hand — was ready to move onto something else on his jam-packed to-do list.
That's the vision for
Founded by Butler, the former president and CEO of Herndon, Virginia-based financial services software and consulting provider Skience, the tool is one of many new ideas
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"I think that there's some real value out there for just ChatGPT in general. I just was curious, like all of us, and had a lot of time over the winter to fool around with it," Butler said in an interview.
After his own testing, Butler began talking to advisors and throwing around ideas about
"And then I thought, how do you take a [new] type of technology and make it really easy for advisors to use? Meaning, there's no training they go into. There's just basic instructions … can we make life that easy?" Butler said. "And so that was the premise."
During the spring, Butler developed the Wealth Management GPT pilot with a group of technologists. With client communication being the goal, the team started with one scenario and eventually built out nine other templates to round out the pilot's offerings.
As of mid-July, about 100 people are involved with the pilot, Butler said. The tool's key features include templates made specifically for wealth managers, personalized client communications, intelligent content suggestions and a simple design that even advisors who don't consider themselves tech experts can navigate.
Butler sat down with Financial Planning this week to discuss his goals for his new venture and explain why human expertise is the key to building AI that actually makes an impact.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Financial Planning: There are 100 people involved in the development of Wealth Management GPT. Is that limited to advisors? Or are you working with other professionals as well?
Marc Butler: It's a pretty wide group. Honestly, we started out with the focus on advisors. And what I quickly learned, probably about a month ago after we did the press release, was that marketing people of all walks and stripes were interested in using this. So anyone who's creating content for advisors, or for the industry in general, was very attracted to this and using this. And so we got about 60 advisors, and then we have about 40 other people, many of which are in the marketing realm. There's also a couple of journalists that are using it and that are interested in it. It's really open to anyone interested, as long as I don't think they're trying to steal some trade secret of mine. The pilot is free. There's no obligation. I'd love to get like 1,000 people on the pilot for a couple months, and then we can sort of go live. And I think that structured format is really beneficial because with ChatGPT you really have to know where you're going. And be able to navigate the prompts.
FP: You've talked a lot about how your natural curiosity for the tech is what was moving you forward during the early stages of development. How soon did you see the potential in ChatGPT as a business tool as you were testing it out?
MB: Pretty quickly. And I saw some things that it couldn't do. Like it wasn't great, or I should say, isn't great at researching people. Like facts on people. Maybe it's gotten better in the last couple of months. But for [researching] myself, it was just completely wrong. So I quickly found out that that doesn't work really well. But if you think about some other things or use cases in wealth management, you think about doing performance calculations. You think about calculations that sit behind a financial planning solution. All of those things can be done in ChatGPT. Even analytics. There's a couple of folks that are doing some deep analytics like pattern recognition and trends. Stuff you'd have to hire 10 people to code. So I think directionally where we would like to go one day is other verticals in financial services. Accounting, banking, insurance, real estate. There's a version of Wealth Management GPT for all of those verticals.
FP: There are a ton of AI tools coming to market right now. How do you stand out in such a packed crowd?
MB: Advisors are very intrigued by it, but the depth of the intrigue is sort of a surface-level thing. Like, they may have gone into ChatGPT and played around with it a little bit. But when some of these other solutions are doing more sophisticated things, that's where the line kind of gets drawn. A lot of advisors just won't go there unless it's super easy to use. Our goal was no training needed. With the exception of two people, everyone that's on the pilot has gotten up and running by themselves without any instruction. So I think that that's the big difference. And look, I'm perfectly fine with [it] if in six months, something has surpassed Wealth Management GPT. Things are moving really fast. So I'm fine with that. This is a fun thing. It's largely experimental. It has a real use case and real value, and we're proving that out. But at the same time, you know, there could be something that upends this. And that's part of the evolution of a lot of these things,
FP: What kind of advisor do you hope to help with this solution?
MB: I thought it could help any advisors, and every market segment has called me to talk about this, from big wirehouses to the smallest RIA. What is consistent across every advisor is they want to communicate effectively with their clients. Some of them want to be creators. They want to be able to create a blog easily. A lot of them don't know how to do it. They want to be able to be organized for client meetings. They want to educate their clients. A lot of the use cases that we have are very applicable, whether you're a million-dollar producer or you're a $50,000 producer. It really doesn't matter. So there isn't a target market. I view every advisor, whether you're independent or you're working in a bank branch or you're part of a wire house, they're all there.
