In the rapidly evolving landscape of wealth management, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force. It is reshaping the industry, changing the ways advisors navigate planning complexities and deliver value to clients. Integrating and leveraging AI-based technologies is top of mind for advisors and others who want to stay ahead of the curve. In this panel, speakers at the forefront of AI development and adoption will provide their insights on everything from opportunities and effective use cases to the ethical and practical challenges that exist when it comes to implementation of AI.
Transcription:
Swati Bairathi (00:10):
Very excited that you're all here to close out the conference and go to the awards. So thank you for sticking with us. I've got a very exciting panel today and we're going to try to talk about things that haven't yet been talked about. That'll be our goal. Let's see how far we succeed. My name as Brian introduced Swati Bairathi, Chief Product Officer at 55ip. We make tax smart, personalized portfolio management solutions and implementation platform and we've been doing machine learning ever since we started. So that's our starting into AI perspective. I would love to have my panel introduce themselves quickly and talk a little bit about their work and then we can dive into some of the problems and use cases that we're seeing in the industry. So Sindhu, do you want to start?
Sindhu Joseph (01:10):
Hi everyone. Very excited to be here. My name is Sindhu Joseph. I'm the CEO and Founder at CogniCor. Probably you have heard seen my demo earlier. So we are a copilot platform for the wealth industry. Not only focusing on the financial advisors but also the back office, the home office, as well as the investors. Our vision is to supercharge the advisors and provide really a end-to-end experience being the intelligence layer on top of the data layer and the infrastructure layer for the wealth industry. As such, I would love to democratize the access to wealth and bring more and more people into the wealth creation and I think AI can really enable that. My background is in ai. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, have spent probably around 20 years building AI solutions and I am really excited about what AI can do in this space.
Swati Bairathi (02:06):
Thank you, Sindhu. Joel?
Joel Bruckenstein (02:07):
Hi, my name is Joel Bruckenstein. I'm President of Technology Tools for Today. I run the T3 conferences. We do the annual T3 insight information tech survey. I've written for just about every magazine in the industry at one point, including financial planning magazine. I've been an advocate for advisor tech for a quarter of century and I do a lot of consulting with both advisory firms and the tech firms that serve the industry.
Swati Bairathi (02:37):
And Mike, if you wouldn't mind reintroducing yourself quickly,
Michael Wilson (02:41):
It's nice to see all of you again. So my name is Mike Wilson. I'm an EVP at Orion where I focus on our internal integration strategy. And what that means is I look at the best ways that we can wire up Redtail Orion advisor, which is Orion Planning Risk Intelligence, which used to be known in levers, Orion compliance, which used to be known as basis code. So there's a lot of companies now that are part of Orion that many of you probably have used over the years or used today we would hope. And so I'm responsible again for connecting those. I've been in the wealth management technology industry my entire career. Well actually my entire life, my dad started a software company back in the late eighties, which was known as Wilson Associates at the time. And so I cut my teeth in this industry copying floppy discs. That was my first job. So I stick one in, it'll be red for a minute, then it'd go green. I'd pull it out and I'd do it over and over and again and again until I got carpal tunnel and sued my dad and ended up with the business.
Swati Bairathi (03:50):
Well long way from there to AI. So as we get underway, one of the things that I would love to explore with the panel is where do we think as we think about the future of wealth management and innovation, where would this innovation come from? Is it going to be startups as we are seeing a lot of startups here or something like a larger firm? So just for those of you who don't know, 55ip was acquired by JP Morgan back in end of 2020. So I'm very close to, while we live in our own ecosystem, which is a FinTech, a small FinTech, we are also exposed to the JP Morgan's big infrastructure. And as you may have heard yesterday, JP Morgan's been investing a tremendous amount of money into AI, in fact to the point where they've given the LLM suite to 50,000 of the employees in asset and wealth management. And at this point there are 3000 prompts being created every hour by the employees, just by the employees. So as we think about that magnitude and we think about the startups, we're seeing a lot of innovation. What do you think that looks like in the longer term? I'm sure we'll find some sort of balance, but Joel would love to start with you as to how you think about it. Where do we go from here?
Joel Bruckenstein (05:22):
The way I think about it is the answer is both because that's the way it's historically been with other emerging technologies and not much has changed. If you think about years ago in financial planning, comprehensive software didn't have coverage of social security. You had third parties, new company startup, they eventually either were bought or the incumbents created solutions as well. If you think about at that long ago, everybody was talking about these shiny new companies. At one point I think we had 10 of 'em one year at T3 and I knew that two thirds of 'em or three quarters of 'em were going to be gone in a year. They were built to be sold and I think we predicted at the time that it was going to be the incumbents. And if you look at who's really controlling the vast number of dollars with regard to robos today, it's the incumbents.
(06:18):
So I think new companies push incumbents to be better and there's a lot of pressure on new older firms to get with the program and I think you're seeing it. I mean most advisors may not be aware of it, but I don't know of one company that we cover in the space that doesn't have some sort of AI initiative going on. So whether it's a custodian, whether it's Orion, whoever you talk to, they're doing something with AI and I think it's too early in the game to say who are going to be the winners and who are going to be the losers, but the best innovation is going to win out.
Swati Bairathi (07:00):
To that. Mike, anything to add?
Michael Wilson (07:02):
Yeah, thank you. So Orion is doing an excellent job in my opinion of building out AI capabilities. I'd say we're in that kind of mid-size business, right? Mid to large size, size firm and we have dedicated resources, highly focused on building out AI. The larger firms as well have AI departments. But one thing I want to give a big shout out to this community for and something that again, where I came from and what I've seen a lot of businesses is where advisors yourselves have these great ideas and you'll start your own business, whether it's an AI business or a software business. I mean how many of the firms out here are probably RIAs that had an idea or advisors that had ideas? And I love that about this community and I think that you all will continue to drive the innovation in this channel and I can only hope and pray that you do that because it makes us all better as a community.
Joel Bruckenstein (08:05):
I would just like to add something to that. I also think that because most of the owners of the businesses in these firms are still what I would call entrepreneurs, you are willing at least the people in this room to be early adopters and you put your money where your mouth is on these new products and you're willing to invest your own dollars and the bigger firms actually look to you to see what you are buying. Because if you're running the the technology department of a big broker dealer and you make a few bed business decisions and investments in tech, you're probably looking for a new job. So they're going to be a little more cautious. Their job is at stake. I think in our industry, because we're entrepreneurs, we fail fast, we try new things. If they don't work, we move on. And I think if you're willing to invest your own money, it continues to create those new startups because people know there's an appetite for it. So it feeds on itself and I think that's why the independent space in particular is so vibrant and continues to be vibrant.
Sindhu Joseph (09:08):
That makes sense.
(09:10):
I just want to kind of give an alternative view as well. Everybody's excited about AI and especially when we work with large enterprises, we see that every department in every business unit is working on something, a pilot, A POC and things like that. What is I think important is what is your business where you are making money? I think if you need to focus on that instead of I want to experiment with LLMS and I want to kind of build something cool, that's nice, but it is also the maintenance aspect of it. You can build something at the POC level pilot level and by the time you go through the bureaucracies of building that it's already outdated because the market has moved on. So if your focus is expanding your client's networks, then I think you have to have that focus instead of diverting your attention and your best talent to building on AI. So it is always a balance, but I think that is a good point of view to take.
Swati Bairathi (10:19):
That makes a lot of sense. So speed and entrepreneurship, those two are going to be the key driver just in terms of speed of innovation as it moves. Makes sense. So let's move on to the use cases that you see for future and there have been a lot of interesting debates today or rather a lot of interesting comments that were made. So when we think about it, I'm particularly coming in from investment management, asset management space focused on portfolio management. I always think about personalization, personalization at scale. That's a key driver in my mind. I would love to hear how you think about it because each of you have a very different definition in terms of what personalization really means. And as we think about it, I know there were some comments earlier in the day where it doesn't seem to be that important. So how important do you think that as a use case for AI is? And then let's also talk about as you get into it, there is other things, client efficiency, excuse me, the efficiency aspect of it and then the engagement aspect. But let's start with personalization as to how you think about it, how important it's going to be as we think about AI. Mike, do you want to start with it?
Michael Wilson (11:37):
Thank you. So I mean I know I was in the last session too, so hopefully this doesn't come across too much like a broken record, but I'll tell you, I think personalization is the name of the game here with AI in terms of being able to communicate at scale with a large group of hopefully a growing client base. What we've done at Orion with personalization, many different things. One is with what we call Redtail speak, it's our chat capability and texting capability between Redtail and your client base. And so an investor can start a conversation with you and you can chat back with them. It'll give you predictive responses based on your conversation with them. It's a wonderful tool, but again, what we won the award for here at Advice AI is what we call the compare smart summary. And what I was challenged to do is build a tool that integrated all those different apps I told you about the Redtail CRM, pulling in client data and then being able to say, okay, for this client I need to raise $10,000.
(12:49):
How can I do that? Well, you need to rebalance and then you have to go see based on your rebalancing, are you still within the risk tolerance band? And once you've determine if they're in the risk tolerance bands, how do we actually make the trades? And once you've made the trades, what advisors told us is like, okay, all that's great, but now I need to go back and talk to my client about that and tell them like, okay, I got you the $10,000 and I did it in tax efficient manner and everything's great. That part of it, that's where we started to use generative AI to build this smart summary and that was all fine and good, but it was very, again, very just standard. It was just a very common dialogue that folks were able to produce with something very helpful. But then we said, okay, well what if we start to introduce some nuance and the first bit of nuance we said is how financial literate is this person.
(13:48):
My sister-in-Law is a very successful stylist in LA. She is brilliant, doesn't know much about finance. My father-in-law career IBM engineer wants to know every ratio under the sun. So they're very different people, same $10,000 requests, very different way to discuss with them. So we introduced that. Then the things that are really cool, what really set this off is the behavioral finance component that we wove in. We have our BFI 20 questionnaire, which I can share with any or all of you which profiles someone. So it'll say Layla, my sister-in-law is a maximizer. George, my father-in-Law, he's a minimizer. So now all of a sudden the language changes in a way that just really helps to drive that dialogue between you and your client and ultimately strengthens your bond and helps 'em to make better investment decisions. That's what personalization means to me, how you can have more of those very high touch conversations in context rather with your clients.
Swati Bairathi (14:57):
That makes sense. I know you have some additional insights into it.
Sindhu Joseph (15:02):
Yeah, I kind of agree with what the conversation is, but for me, personalization is three key aspects. One is being aware of the client profile, the advisor profile, and in a broader firm level, how do you understand the firm? So being aware of everything about that household is one of the key things in personalization. Second is having the knowledge of the market of the options that are there, and third is being proactive. So if these three aspects are coming together, that's when you are able to deliver a service. So we look at it from us, you probably saw the demo, we build it out from the client household level, how can we understand the household in a very, very personalized manner from the family perspective, from the occupational recreational perspective, but also from a financial perspective and use that to deliver how can this person optimize on tax?
(16:12):
It could be very, very different from some other profile of the household and a high net worth individuals and household might look at estate planning and trust accounts in a very different way rather than a mass affluent household. So how can you provide, learn from all of these millions of data points and put these in a different types of households and deliver services based on that in a proactive way when they they have life events changes that happens or when they have a market incident that happens. So how can we deliver services and know that okay, these people are looking for those things and get there. So that's my definition of personalization. I think if we are able to kind of utilize AI for that, we can really scale financial advisory service to a lot more people.
Swati Bairathi (17:12):
Makes sense.
Joel Bruckenstein (17:13):
Yeah, I would add a couple of things. So for example, this morning Michael was talking about he's got a hundred households, he knows 'em all. Well, he has some superpowers. First of all that I don't, but assuming I had those superpowers, I still think surfacing opportunities in your current client base is extremely valuable. Some people say next best action, but it's really more than that. It's about being able at any given time not to have to go through your CRM and do queries to figure out who might be coming up on a milestone. It should be AI on a daily basis, looking through all the data that you have on these clients and surfacing opportunities as they come up. So you don't have to do any searches. It's proactive, it comes to you, you don't have to go to it. Another really good example that I think has been talked about a little bit, but probably not enough is marketing.
(18:05):
So personalization in prospecting. If you have a prospect coming in the office and you use an AI tool, you can probably know a lot about that prospect before they walk in the door based upon their profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, what have you, and just knowing what their interests are and maybe finding some touch points that you have in common to create a bond on the first impression I think is really important. So I think there are certain aspects of personalization that yes, you can do without AI with the tools available today, but I really do believe that you can enhance the tools for your current clients and also prospecting. It will give you some superpowers.
Swati Bairathi (18:53):
Definitely, definitely. And as while Joel, we are on the topic of personalization as we move into potentially client engagement and efficiency, do you also have thoughts about chatbot?
Joel Bruckenstein (19:06):
I do have thoughts about chatbot and I have a strong disagreement with what Michael said this morning because first of all, I don't even think it's practical what he said, right? Yes, a lot of us use two fingers, but a lot of us don't put very long prompts in. So if you want to type in a prompt for me, it's not a problem and I type with two fingers, but I think more importantly what he's saying to the technology firms out there, I would give you strong advice. Don't listen to what he said. Redoing your front end, it takes months and it's very expensive. There's something really simple you can do that'll make it available to everybody. Just voice enable it, right? I don't know how many of you have seen, for example, mo, which is the Morningstar chat bot. Where it's going with that is it'll be able to do complex searches.
(20:00):
So right now, if you want to screen the Morningstar database, if you've never done it before, they have a 40 minute class video on how to do it because it's complex and some of us have been doing it for years, but if you've never done it before, it's challenging, well guess what? Soon you'll be able to go to MO and say, show me all mutual funds or ETFs with a 10 year track record that have a low correlation to whatever it is and have this risk characteristics and these return characteristics. You won't have to learn how to do complex searches anymore. And same thing with your database. Yes, you can go in and create a complex search and if you have a really strong database today on a front end, you probably have something that allows you to do complex searches, but how much easier would it just be to everybody say, this is what I'm looking for, right? Show me all clients that live in Massachusetts, they just came out with some new tax law that have this situation and they'll just all pop up. I mean, that's what a chat bot will do, and those are the kinds of searches that I think you'll want to do and you'll want to do 'em with voice. I think it's long overdue in this industry. We should have had it five or 10 years ago, but I think now it's coming and it's going to change our lives.
Sindhu Joseph (21:20):
I just want to add to that, in terms of AI being the new ui, so the software industry, not the wealth industry assets, but software industry has been focused on building UI elements and it is so complex the front end of building something that is you have 10 menus menu items, and you have to do 10 different clicks to even in the regulated industries, to get to a training, you have to do 70 clicks sometimes. So that has been the experience so far. AI is going to revolutionize that experience in terms of creating a very, very simplified ux. You don't have to, anytime you change something, you don't have to build a new UI for that. So I think it resonates very well in terms of what is that interface is going to be and it's going to be conversational. So yeah, I think it is the future.
Swati Bairathi (22:17):
Makes sense. I think as we think about all of these use cases as they evolve, let's for a minute, talk about how do financial advisors find all of these things? What are the risks inherent in some of them? With chat bots, with personalization, there are risk. And Joel, to that point also maybe talk about due diligence. How does the financial advisor go about doing some level of due diligence on these AI products that are coming up every day?
Joel Bruckenstein (22:49):
Look, I think it's not just AI products. Small to mid-size firms in general really struggle with this. If you're a large firm, multi-billion dollar RIA, if you're a broker dealer, you are full-time compliance people. This is what they're trained to do. But if you don't have that scale, you have a part-time person who's doing it that's probably not really trained to do it. They got the short straw and you become the chief compliance officer. So that's problematic. I know from going into many firms today that on things like cybersecurity, they're not doing what their documents say they're doing. It's not because they don't want to, they don't know how to. With AI, we're going to have the exact same problem. There are some good resources out there that you can go to. One is to hire a consultant. The other is open VRM, which is a free website that you can go to.
(23:42):
It was originally designed to be a repository where all your vendors put all their due diligence materials and you can just download it in one place. Not everybody is participating, but Orion is trade. There's a lot of firms in the industry that are participating and they're about to offer a new service if they're not already that says, we'll do all the due diligence for you, we'll get all the documents, we'll review them, but then they're reviewed by somebody who understands AI and understands cybersecurity. Two things that most advisory firms don't understand at all, and so if you're not willing to educate yourself, and it's pretty much a full-time job, hire somebody to do it, especially if you can do it at a very low cost.
Swati Bairathi (24:25):
Mike, any thought from you?
Michael Wilson (24:26):
Yeah, I would also recommend relying on your broker dealers. Many of them have vendor affinity programs that are doing quite a bit of vetting before they'll allow firms to join them as well as custodians, mostly custodians have technology consultants that spend a lot of time with, well, I know they spend time with us and I know they do as well with other firms. So understanding their technology stack and they wouldn't recommend anybody that didn't have their house in order from a compliance and safety perspective.
Swati Bairathi (25:02):
So it sounds like there are a lot of resources available for financial advisors to go. They don't just have to accept a solution.
Sindhu Joseph (25:13):
I have a different point of view on that and from a AI due diligence standpoint, because it is different from any other vendor due diligence, you can look at how the privacy is handled and data security is, but for AI, you should also look at how is the bias handled? Is there a bias in the models that you are using or is there hallucination that is put into the model? Is there evidence presented in the responses or recommendations that are given? So the problem with these are you don't have the infrastructure even today to kind of test these hypothesis. So for example, core we are using internally. We have an enterprise platform that does these things internally for our own development, but we don't offer that solution to the market. But there needs to be tools out there that allows you to, I have a test case of for bias and I should be able to upload and test any models like is this model biased or is this model producing hallucinations and things like that. So I think the industry is just beginning to explore these things and until then we probably cannot really do the complete due diligence.
Joel Bruckenstein (26:36):
I would agree, but again, I think ultimately it argues for third parties because they can do it at scale, do a thorough test of something and then share that data with many companies. It's unrealistic in my opinion, for everybody out here to go through that process even if they could because it would be very expensive and very time consuming. So I just don't think it's something that individual firms, unless they're massive like a Fidelity or something like that, can do that kind of research today.
Swati Bairathi (27:07):
So now we move in. We talked about due diligence as we talk about the future of wealth management. The other big elephant in the room is the regulatory framework. SEC FINRA, you were at CFP board. These regulatory bodies will continue to evolve. What do we think this would look like? Is this going to stifle the innovation? Are they going to find a way to work with it? What are your thoughts?
Joel Bruckenstein (27:37):
Well, first of all, everybody has regulations now or guidance practice standards including the CFP board around technology in general and usage. And if you use an algorithm, if you use AI, you're supposed to vet it and you're supposed to know, we just established none of them can do that. So everybody is really out of compliance if you want to think about it. But that's really the fact of the matter, right? Realistically, I think you see the development in certain areas for certain reasons. If you go into the exhibit hall, there's five like meeting or notetaking companies. Why? Because a relatively safe area from a regulatory perspective, same thing I would say with regulatory AI around scanning emails or things of that nature. It's pretty much fact-based. If you train the model, right, you're going to get good results. There's not a lot of wobble there. I would say the third rail of technology in the AI space, right today is investment related if it's client facing. So yes, it's fine to use AI to do investment research to summarize analyst reports. Like I said before too, stand through large groups of data based on parameters that you set. But if you are going to say, Hey, I'm going to have an AI build a portfolio for you or make individual stock recommendations, I can almost guarantee you're going to get a visit from the regulators and it's going to feel like a proctology exam.
Swati Bairathi (29:17):
I don't think we need that. Mike, anything from you?
Michael Wilson (29:22):
Yeah, this is one that I've really been struggling with over the past couple of days is this concept of not wanting to store everything from every meeting, and I kind of want to raise my hand and say, that's bs. I mean, if you all are fiduciaries and we're all trying to do right by each other, why wouldn't it be okay if you stored everything? Why shouldn't that be democratized? If I talk to you and you talk to me, why can't you just put that down for the history of time? Is it because maybe I said something or you said something that could be held against me at some point? Okay, well then it becomes he said type of thing. I don't know. Morally and ethically that doesn't jive with me. My opinion is, okay, let's say we do start storing all that information, then AI could take it to the next level and start catching where maybe if you were my advisor and you said something to me that would bubble up and give you a heads up and have you act on it before, maybe I could as your client come back to you some point later and say like, wait a second.
(30:33):
You told me you were going to do this for me or you promised me that you could get ahead of it. So I don't really understand the gap there.
Joel Bruckenstein (30:43):
I'm on the fence there and I'll tell you why, right? First of all, just the amount of data that advisor's going to store is going to go up geometrically, right? And there's going to be PII on there, which is more to worry about. They have to store. And even though you can say something that may be neutral, it could be misconstrued by a third party. And I just think that attorneys who are looking for new business would have a field day with that and just the cost of discovery. If you think about if we start doing this tomorrow, 10 years from now, what that volume of data is going to be like, and just the discovery process is going to be not something the typical advisory firm can handle. It's going to be expensive.
Michael Wilson (31:24):
You think the discovery of going through data like gripping through data is more expensive than trying to call witnesses. And,
Joel Bruckenstein (31:33):
I just know what lawyers charge to go through it. I may go through it very fast, but they're not saying they go through it very fast. I'm with you there.
Swati Bairathi (31:42):
Was that a question?
Joel Bruckenstein (31:44):
Yeah. Well, they probably do, but they're not charging you by the AI hour. They're charging you by the minute that an attorney's involved in it in any way, shape or form.
Audience Member 1 (31:56):
There are other countries in the world's normal to record every single conversation for compliance purposes. I do think there's other countries, and most of them don't have the legal system we do, and the amount of lawsuits that we do.
Sindhu Joseph (32:15):
I think it's all about providing optionality. It's an individual preference to certain extent you can or firm's preference. But from a broader perspective, I think regulatory and compliance has to stay two step behind for the innovation to flourish. For example, I'm sure all of you love Uber and automated Tesla drives and things like that, they never went through all of these compliance and regulatory processes when they were initially introduced into the market. For example, taxis had a completely different regulatory process to go through while Uber could just walk away with anything. And the same with Tesla's. We probably still not sure if Tesla goes and gets into an accident and kills a person who's responsible. We are still figuring that out. So while financial world is a little bit different, I understand the implications I feel for innovation to flourish. They need to step away and look the other way for some time to make that happen.
Swati Bairathi (33:32):
Why don't we open it up for questions? We only have three minutes, but it would be great to take one or two questions. I don't know if the panel can answer it in one or two minutes, but we'll try. No,
(33:47):
Well, there are no questions. I think everybody's questioned out.
Joel Bruckenstein (33:51):
Everybody's wants cocktails.
Swati Bairathi (33:53):
I know. Okay, so last, I'll ask the last question. Any advice for the financial advisors or any predictions for the future? Sindhu, let's start with you.
Sindhu Joseph (34:06):
Yeah, so no advice. I'm not an advisor, but I do have some predictions on the future or would love to see some of the things that coming together. So throughout this couple of days, and I have been into many conference on the financial advice side, I haven't seen many conversations around health and wealth coming together. So there is a huge amount of, as an integrated personality and household, you have a lot of health information that is sitting around that is handled by insurance providers and hospitals, but that is not being integrated into your wealth planning and all of those aspects. I know that it's private and sensitive, but providing that personalized advice of the future, I think everybody has to come together in terms of aggregation of data and even provide guidance of if you kind of follow this regime, you are able to live better and you are able to live longer. And accordingly, your financial plan has to support those kinds of living standards and so on. So bringing these two together and providing a holistic planning based on that individual and that household is for me the holy grail. Yeah, the holy grail of financial planning. Holy, yeah.
Swati Bairathi (35:45):
There is a question.
Audience Member 2 (35:47):
A question. Just to say a solution is actually out there for that, just so you know for each. So it's out there and some of us are working with that to integrate the health and the wealth together because just to back your point up, it's very, very important because most of us doing plans or people doing plans do not know what the future health events of people will be. So therefore the plan is fundamentally flawed. And Robert's got a lot of data to help with that, and I think there are others as well who are bringing that to the table, just so you know.
Sindhu Joseph (36:25):
That's amazing. It would be great to have a kind of platform or a layer where this thing come together, but yeah, that's a great first step in that direction.
Joel Bruckenstein (36:35):
Yeah, I'm familiar with that. It's not personalized data. I think once you get into personalized data, you run into HIPAA and even more regulation, and that's the reason I don't think it's happened yet. I agree with you. I think it'll be great and I think we'll get there. As far as advice, it's just stay informed, right? I mean, I do this full time and it's difficult to stay up with everything that's going on. You absolutely need to have somebody in your firm. It's their responsibility to monitor what's going on in the industry, look at the new vendors, check out what your colleagues are doing and what the competition is doing. And I think that's number one. And up your, I would say due diligence game a lot as far as predictions, I think within a number of years, AI is going to be as commonplace in our industry as email was or your iPhone. It's just going to be part of everything you do and every single advisor is going to be using it on a daily basis.
Michael Wilson (37:35):
I would say to echo that and say, keep doing what you're doing that's providing great advice to your clients just by fact and that you're here means that you're interested in probably using AI. So you're either with or ahead of the curve, which is a positive sign for sure. I think advisors that do not embrace AI are going to be the ones that go the way of the dinosaur. It's not going to be you who are taking AI and harnessing it. I think you're going to thrive with it. Do more business and encourage your staff to use ai, teach them to be or put them in classes to become better prompt engineers. Prompt engineers are probably the next middle office for all of you people that can really interact with the tech and understand how to use all four, eight fingers to type not two, those are going to be the folks that you really need to be hammering away for you all.
Joel Bruckenstein (38:35):
I had heard a guy from Google not too long ago speak and he said, prompts are the new search engine terms. It's going to be that common. And it took us a while to learn how to really use search engines to their maximum value. It's going to be the same thing with AI, it's iterative. If you've never done it the first couple of times, you're going to feel uncomfortable. But I think the more you do it, the more comfortable you feel with it, just like any other tool. And again, it's going to be second nature to everybody. Everybody who survives within a short period of time.
Swati Bairathi (39:08):
Alright, since you brought it up, one existential question sounds a little bit like roboadvisors 10 years ago, would AI take financial advisors job or is it going to become a co-pilot and they will all become, everybody becomes a profit engineer.
Joel Bruckenstein (39:30):
In the foreseeable future? AI is not going to take anybody's job. I think there's a consensus among most of the people who know this industry that it is actually going to empower you to do a better job for your clients and it's going to add capacity to your business and it's going to be a growth engine for the future. Who knows 10 or 20 years out, but certainly for the next decade, I'm not worried about it at all. I think advisors that do a good job and do more than just create a portfolio and charge a hundred basis points, ones who are doing real financial planning and really helping their clients, they're going to thrive.
Michael Wilson (40:06):
Yeah, listen, until you can show me a bot, a chatbot, or any form of AI that I can pick up the phone and feel like someone really cares about me and understands me more than any machine could ever, in my opinion, financial advice is never going to go away. You all are too important, right? You mean too much to your clients. You all know that, right? So no, I think again, I believe that AI is going to be additive to your practice. It's going to help you do more with the same amount of resources.
Swati Bairathi (40:45):
It's a relationship business. Yep. That's really what it is. So it helps empower them. Anything to add, Sindhu?
Sindhu Joseph (40:52):
Maybe not the best way to stop the presentation, but Oh God, I think it's maybe not 10, not 20 years from now, but every industry is going to be disrupted by ai. And I think we have to take into account that there are jobs that are going to be disrupted, eliminated contact center jobs. Like who would do that? Mostly AI will do it. There are many that AI would be, so if you look at the chart, which are the jobs that are going to be disrupted by ai, financial advisors are on very top of that list. But there is counter to that along with judges. So they are also kind of on the top. But the counter argument to that is, although they could be kind of completely disrupted, nobody wants to take the responsibility of removing a judge and putting an AI judge there. So because of that, judges are going to prevail as much as financial advisors. But this is an opportunity for everybody to kind of expand your reach to below the mass affluent and medium income households. And there are 12 trillion left on the table. Imagine investing all of those and creating and expanding the market for those. And so,
Joel Bruckenstein (42:24):
It's the middle and the back office that's going to be disrupted first in our industry. And that's not 10 years out. That's maybe a couple of years out. You're just not going to need as many support staff as you do today because a lot of the jobs that are rote jobs that don't include your individual intellectual property are going to be taken over by machines. And again, that's a good thing for the business. And hopefully some of those folks you'll be able to promote to advisors to serve more people. And other ones, yes, they're going to need to find another job. There's certain jobs in the back office that are not going to exist five years from now.
Swati Bairathi (43:02):
Totally. As disruption happens, I'm pretty sure new industries will be created, new jobs will be created. We're not even thinking about them just yet. So needless to say, we're in an early inning with AI, but there's a lot going on. Obviously new products are being created, the disruptions on the way, there's a lot to be considered. So any final parting words in quick shot? Anything else to add before we close out the conference and award ceremony begins?
Joel Bruckenstein (43:36):
I would just say I'm super bullish on the future of this industry because I think AI is going to be extremely additive much more than people think today. And none of you have to worry about your jobs.
Swati Bairathi (43:49):
That's a good point.
Sindhu Joseph (43:52):
I think wealth industry as such has been way behind. If you look at Amazons of the world, Ubers of the world, and this is kind of, we have a number of tailwinds in terms of wealth, huge wealth transfer, the explosion of RIAs and so on, but also the help of ai. So this is the perfect moment that we have in front of us to capture and revolutionize this space. And if we don't capture this moment, it is going to, we are completely going to be replaced by something the Silicon Valley is going to come up. So I think I'm excited to be part of this revolution, and I think we have got this covered.
Swati Bairathi (44:38):
Well summarized.
Michael Wilson (44:41):
We're at a tipping point right now. Many different ways in this industry with AI of course, but when you look at the generational wealth transfer, that's about to happen. If your clients right now aren't the ones asking for and expecting these type of high touch personalized experiences, or if they're not the ones who expect the high tech or even that you're talking about using AI or maybe you're inviting an AI agent to your Zoom calls with them, their kids are right. They're expecting that next. And so I would just encourage you to get ahead of it. And again, I appreciate you all being here and applaud you for being part of this because you are obviously quite interested in the future, which is now.
Swati Bairathi (45:28):
Perfect. Well thank you everyone. Thank you to my panel. Really appreciate the session.
AI Visionaries: Innovating the Future of Wealth Management
November 12, 2024 3:55 PM
45:42