From The Horses' Mouths: Peer Advice For Getting The Most Out Of Wealth Management AI Tools

Do we buy anything these days without reading the reviews first? Well, it's no different in wealth tech!  And especially new tech tools powered by AI. In this session, you'll hear directly from advisors who have adopted AI in their practices; how they use, what it solves for and how they have dealt with any challenges they have encountered. They will also address definable and tangible results that have made a difference for their businesses and clients. 

Transcription:

Rachel Witkowski (00:11):

Excellent. Hello everyone. I'm Rachel Witkowski. I'm the Tech/AI Reporter at Financial Planning. Thank you for making it here this afternoon. I'm actually very excited about this panel because these are leaders in your own industry who are actually using AI on a daily basis. So we're going to get into those examples very quickly here. But for a moment, I'd love for each of you to introduce yourselves.

Shane Cummings (00:36):

Oh, go ahead. Hi, I'm Shane Cummings. I'm with Halbert Hargrove Global Advisors. We're a $3 billion independent RIA and I serve as a Director of Technology and Cybersecurity as well as a Wealth Advisor.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (00:51):

Hi everyone. My name is Rianka Dorsainvil. I am the Founder and Senior Wealth Advisor at YGC Wealth. I'm a three time founder. I say that because I started my original firm in 2015 before all of this technology was even invented. And I started my firm in 2015, a hundred percent virtual back in 2015, and it still is virtual till this day. In 2020, I merged my firm with another practitioner, and ultimately at the end of 2023, we decided to dissolve that firm and I relaunched on July 1st, so a quarter in with my new firm. However, it was a blessing in disguise because I was able to basically start with a clean slate as far as just what tools and technologies I wanted to use. And so for about six to eight months, I was really digging in and researching how do I want to start this new firm? What technologies I want to use, who do I want to hire this time around? And AI played a pivotal role in how I decided to reimagine my firm YGC Wealth.

Erik Allison (02:02):

Awesome. Hey, my name is Erik Allison. I'm a Wealth Advisor. I'm also a Founder. I'm the Founder of EAWealth.ai. I started back at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney 16 years ago, transitioned to United Capital that sold to Goldman Sachs. And then after that started my own firm, RIA firm in the state of Nevada and got curtailed into the venture capital world. So I launched a venture capital firm and a commercial insurance company. But the passion that I have is around wealth management. That's where EAWealth comes in. And what I focus on is helping business owners legally and ethically disinherit the IRS and make smart financial decisions through wealth visualization.

Rachel Witkowski (02:43):

Excellent. So the whole reason we're here, right? Can you give some actual use cases of the types of AI tools you're using at your firm? We can go down the line.

Shane Cummings (02:53):

Sure. So I'm sure a lot of people here, our firm's, about 50 people we're really interested in time saving. So right now we're using one of the meeting transcription apps, which has been pretty exciting for us. There's obviously a lot of interest in time savings and efficiencies there. We're also using AI on the wealth advisory side, so using it for estate plan reviews. So that had been an area where that one can morph into a huge time suck and it's really hard to scale. So that one's been exciting for us. And then we're now starting to dabble with marketing applications as well as just kind of general day-to-day AI uses for efficiency here and there.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (03:40):

For me, I would say the biggest time save has been JUMP. So they demoed here. They're also one of the vendors and I JUMP has saved me so much time again as I was re-imagining what I wanted my firm to look like, my client experience, and again, just like from a revenue standpoint and a profit standpoint, is a associate advisor the best use of their time sitting in my client meetings, just taking notes and the answer was no. And so JUMP is now the replacement of a note taker. It takes really great notes and it has saved me probably about two hours per client meeting. And I say that because it not only takes really great meeting notes, it also drafts really great. I would say the great thing about you all being here is that you'll probably be early adopters. And being early adopters means that you have that one-on-one time with the founders, with the developers because they are looking to us and asking questions of is our tool answering the question that you want answered?

(04:57):

And if the answer is no, they're like, well, how can we do this better? So JUMP has been a really great tool. I also use Vega Mines who was also another vendor here and also demoed earlier today. Vega Mines has been life-changing. I will say Vega Mines, it also takes me to notes as well, but where I find they shine the most is drafting follow-up emails to clients. So how they actually use it is my tech stack is with Google Suite, and so they embed into my Google Suite the security of it, it's secure. I grilled them to know the actual complexity and compliance of it. Go ahead and ask Alex the founder, he may still be here, but they embed, they also embed into Wealth Box. And so if it is listed that this is a client and they are assigned to me, or even if they're an alliance professional, an email will draft.

(06:00):

How this actually worked was a couple of days ago, a client emailed me and shared that her mother-in-Law just receive news that she has an advanced stage of cancer and that they want to have their estate documents looked at. And the mom lives in New Jersey, they're in Maryland. What are some of the things that they should be looking at? The mom has a financial planner, and it was a list of questions within one minute. There was a draft in my inbox literally answering all of the questions, and I would say it was 95% there and I was just blown away. So JUMP Vega Mines. Of course, FP Alpha has been one of the key players around for a few years now that has just continued to expand and deliver great work. And there was another one, it'll come back to me.

Erik Allison (06:58):

Maybe I can prompt it.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (07:00):

Yes, please.

Erik Allison (07:02):

I've used AI in a lot of different ways, but what I find most valuable is how it allows me to connect emotionally and on a personal level with my clients and prospects. And one of the biggest tools that I'm using is Advisor X ai and the purpose behind using it, not only does it save hours a day, but when you think about interacting with the people that we serve and the business owners that I help make smart financial decisions, and this is going to kind of like, sorry, Rachel, going to lead into maybe one of the next questions is AI going to ever replace human advisors? But the purpose behind me using Advisor Xai, it allows me to create different personas. Each persona I can create can be a content marketer, an estate planning strategist, operational efficiency tax mitigation specialist. And it's not to replace the knowledge that I have that I've studied and used over the last 16 years.

(08:02):

It's really just for me to not get writer's block and for me to come up with new ideas that connect personally with my prospects and clients. For example, I'm a huge golfer. We sponsor a PGA tour player who's playing right now in the Desert Classic. His name's Nate Lashley. I think he's three or four under, so go Nate. But for a lot of the people that I work with who are business owners who love golf, I want to connect with them on a level that relates to their tax headaches, their estate planning, their entity structuring, maintaining key employees and keeping them happy and in their firm. But I also want to apply it to things that are important to them personally. So advisor AI allows me to enter in what's called a knowledge base. So I can put in domains, I can put in PDF documents, I can put in research reports, and then when I query that and ask those questions, I can say things like, write me an article that is relevant to my clients that relates golf and the struggles that come with that.

(09:07):

And whoever golfs in here, you know what I'm talking about and how it also applies to not feeling comfortable about what the answer might be to something that's a complex financial matter. And one of the things that's really important for a lot of people out there, and you guys know this as advisors, clients need someone who can be an objective sounding board, right? Sometimes I say my client's on demand financial quarterback or financial caddy. It's really just given them peace of mind because the world is complex. And when you look at tax issues and you look at entity structure and you look at all these different things, and now with the great transfer of wealth, there's so many different strategies from a trust perspective, you've got grats and CRUT and slots and eyelets and all these different things. The Advisory XAI tool that I use, long story short, it allows me to apply personal interactions and personal meaning with my clients and prospects and not allow, it allows me to save time as opposed to having to think of concepts, think of unique ways to tie what they're dealing with and how I can provide a solution.

(10:15):

And then it just opens up a discussion. It sometimes allows for a conversation that maybe we haven't had in the past. I've got a client in Reno that I've been working with and we were just talking, he's a new client and we hadn't really gotten to the point of touching on the full-blown estate planning in terms of his family. Come to find out he's got a blended family, he's got a stepmom, and his dad and his stepmom just passed away and they had their own revocable trust and they had their own whole structure. He's like, I don't really know what's going to happen. So in addition to using Advisor XAI, FP Alpha is a really great tool. There's also some things that are embedded into my proprietary tech stack that we built out in terms of wealth visualization. And that's something that's really been valuable for me and my clients too, is it's tough to just have someone say, here's how it works and have a bunch of words. But when you can visualize it and see here's where it flows at first death here, where it might go at second death, here's the waterfall, here's your shortfall on your estate tax minimization and here's what the exemption level is and whether you're above or below it, which triggers conversation. So those are some ways that I'm using it in a creative way, not so to replace the knowledge or the insights that we all have on this stage. But to enhance really just the relationship with the client is what I'm finding most valuable at the moment.

Rachel Witkowski (11:48):

It feels like I'm getting some sort of tech offering or pitch every other day. It feels like it's really this year it has extremely accelerated. How do you determine which tool you want to even test out and take the time to make sure it's worth implementing? How do you decide which ones to pick?

Shane Cummings (12:07):

I think kind of establishing a committee within your firm, or at least a group of people that are tasked with prioritizing is really critical. When we started looking at all these tools, it was a little bit kind of haphazard and we got together a group of people we meet once a month now and we have an agenda, we set priorities. And some people are really excited about some apps and others are excited about some other ones. But I think getting some consensus as to what's most important is really critical. So you know where to focus that time because it's really easy to jump in at ease and get excited and then burn a whole bunch of time, which might be really fun if you're into the technology like I am. But not everybody's got that much time to kill these days. So I think you have to kind of drill down into what really matters. And it is, I think some of the other speakers were saying the ROI, what you're going to get the most bang for your buck out of. And there's a lot of options out there. And ideally it would be, I think it was like Michael Kites was saying, ideally something that's already in your tech stack that may be developing these features. And if not, then going out and looking for a tool that's going to nail that feature that you really need.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (13:22):

I would say something similar in a sense of just what is your most pain points in your day. So if you just generally think about your day or your week, and it's just like what do you spend the most time doing that you like the least? For me, it's meeting notes, but it's probably the most important aspect of your firm because if something happens to you and another advisor needs to step in, can they actually do that? Right? Clients want that autonomy, not the autonomy, but the continuity of, okay, Shane, he couldn't step in but or he's out for a medical leave. For whatever reason, Rianka is stepping in. Well, if I want to feel very confident, I want to be able to read some very detailed meeting notes. And so knowing where I was transitioning in my firm, I wanted to make sure that that was one of the things I did not have to worry about.

(14:18):

And so the ROI for me is it has already paid for itself 10 times over. I explained earlier it takes about two hours from cleaning up the meeting notes to drafting. I draft very detailed follow-up emails because sometimes I forget what we talk about in client meetings. In one week you could probably have 10 different client meetings. I'm like, gosh, what did we talk about? So how I draft my emails is at the beginning, of course, the niceties and then the meeting overview, like the meeting recap, and it's a very detailed email of what do we talk about? Sometimes clients forget as well, right? They are looking at their expenses and looking at the bottom line, what expense do I want to cut first? And you don't want it to be you, right? So they can go back to those emails and see like, wow, Bianca and Shane and Erik, they're valuable. I cannot cut them. Okay, let me go to the next thing, right? So in my emails, it's meeting overview, what their action items are, what mine is, and it's been again, a huge time saver. Yeah, I'll stop there.

Erik Allison (15:28):

My wife's in the room here and she's going to know exactly what I'm talking about. I stay up late hours of the night and go into your question about how do you choose what I to use? How do you decide on what's right for your firm and is it going to add value to you and your clients? It's a challenge, right? I'm a tech nerd. I love all the new shiny toys, and for me, how do I choose? I start by does their website clearly define what value they add to me as an advisor? And how does that translate to how I can serve my clients better? Is it visually appealing? Is it priced right? Is it easy to sign up? Does it have all the features I want and need? Or is it missing something? Do they have video demos? Do they have resources?

(16:16):

The websites and companies that when I'm researching what to use for my firm and in my practice, if they don't have any of that stuff, I just click to the next. And relating that back to our businesses too. I think that's a good point for us all to realize as a tangential topic, clients want to know what you do, and it's easy to be like, we manage money, we do sophisticated investment portfolios and financial planning. But from a client perspective, think about it. What does it look like and what do they want to see? I think about when I go to company's websites and I want to purchase a service or a SaaS platform or a technology, if they don't have anything visually appealing or the hooks or the messaging or the clear delineation of why I should be looking at this, I'm clicking onto the next.

(17:04):

But the challenge is you have to look at a lot of different things. Some of them have a really cool offering or visual, and then when you get into a demo or you start talking to the team, you realize they're either green or they don't have the sophistication on the backside to really support you. long-term. Are they a startup and they're raising venture capital? Are they friends and family rounds? Are they going to be here next month? That's one of the biggest challenges too, is the LLMs and the half-life of what's going on in technology. It's changing so quickly. What I think is cool today, next week, there's something that's already cooler. So that's a big challenge. And then we can't forget security and privacy. A lot of us think about your daily lives, whether you get a new phone or you use Google or any other website that you sign up for, whether it's a social site, you just click yes on terms of service, you click yes on privacy policies, you click yes on this.

(18:00):

And why do we do that? Because we want instant gratification. We want access to things quickly. And it's just ironic that AI is preaching and is helping us get to solutions quicker, but we can't overlook the fact that we still have to do our due diligence, protect ourselves, protect our firms, and protect our client's data. So when I'm looking at different tools, I'm making sure to download those privacy policies or copying 'em into a Word document and download the user agreements and the data policies. And ironically enough, I throw them into Notebook, LLM or Notebook, lm, which is a Google offering, and allows you to upload documents and then click which documents you want to query for, and then you can ask any question you want. And so I just upload privacy policies and I go, Hey, from an advisor perspective, from my client's data perspective, what in this agreement has me potentially at harm? Where am I vulnerable? And then it just tells you. So those are some ways that I'm looking at it, not just from is it valuable? Will it save me time, will it save me money? Will it add value to my client's lives? But is it going to protect us and keep our information private? So that's something that's been important that, sorry, honey, I've been staying up late at night making sure to check all that stuff.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (19:19):

Something to add to really quickly to what Erik just said is also the customer service at these AI companies and these technology companies, do they have, like you said, the infrastructure to support you? So any of the technology tools that I use, that's one of the things that I look at because I have a lot of questions.

Erik Allison (19:38):

May be both.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (19:40):

I have a lot of questions, and if something is breaking or if something is not working well, I need it to be fixed immediately. And so what's the turnaround time? And then also ask your peers, right? Ask what are you using? What has your experience been with their customer service? Have they been quick to turn around and answer your queries or whatever the case may be? And so I think that is really important. Going back to the demos, we're busy. I don't have time, so this is to the vendors out there. If you're still here, I don't have time to be demoing all the time. So if you can just do a quick demo on YouTube and because Googling and YouTubing all of your companies, and I want to see is there something out there that I can even look at first to see if I'm even interested in actually demoing what you have to offer. And that has led me to quite a few AI tools to then actually physically demo because my time is my currency, right? Your time is your currency, and so we want to make sure that you're having the best use of your time.

Rachel Witkowski (20:42):

This is a great segue. I wanted to dive deeper into this idea of vetting your vendor. What should advisors be asking beyond the SOC two reports?

Shane Cummings (20:52):

We usually start with that because that's important and we gather all the documents every year. But I think what Erik mentioned is good and rianka, are they going to be around in a couple years? You don't know that for sure, but I think just kind of chatting with a support team, can you give you an idea sometime how responsive they are talking to your peers? Always good. Do they show up at conferences like this where they're putting themselves out there and you can chat with the team? That's always important.

Erik Allison (21:29):

Yeah. I look for a couple different things. Is the founder responsive? Is the team that the founders put in place responsive? Is it a couple days before I'm hearing back or is it the same day? I understand everybody's busy, so I'm not banging if they're not getting back to me in 12 hours. But the tools that I've chosen to use, part of the reason I do it is because the founder's available when I'm speaking with them and I bring suggestions to the table, he goes, oh, that's a really great idea. Or she goes, oh, that's amazing. I never thought about that. Hey, yeah, lemme get my team on it. Or I'll work on it. And within a couple days, or even a couple weeks, some of the companies that I've contracted with and become early adopters of literally every week they're shooting me emails that I'm unexpecting and they're going, Hey, thank you for that suggestion. We've implemented it. Check it out, use it. Let us know what you think.

(22:19):

That kind of blows me away. So when they're doing things like that that are listening to advisor feedback, that's really valuable. The last thing I want personally is to work with a huge company that has a bunch of red tape and I go, I'm not sure why you're doing it this way. It doesn't save me time. It doesn't really make sense and it's confusing. And they go, oh, well, that's the way it is. Okay, you might not be the service provider. For me, that's not friendly. And that's the same way clients want to work with their advisors too. If the advisor's like, oh, I can't produce that report for you, or I can't explain this in a timely manner, or I can't extend my services to something like tax return analysis, or I can't take your 200 pages of complex estate documents and scan 'em into my AI platform and extrapolate all the data and show you what exactly it means because you're going through a life event, maybe one of your parents just died. It's not really my thing. They're going to look elsewhere. So from that perspective, I look for things like that to make sure that they're going to listen to the feedback. Otherwise I'm just a prisoner to what they think is best. And sometimes what service providers think is best for advisors or what advisors want for their clients. Sometimes it's not on the same page as what we think about.

(23:36):

And if you're providing a service to someone, you need to make sure that you're catering to them and they're happy with it. So that's a big thing. Pricing's obviously important security. We talked about SOC and all that, but yeah, those are some things. And then also funding. Are they controlled by venture capital? A lot of these companies right now, honestly, I'm not sure how many of you in the audience have been looking at these different firms. A lot of 'em are bootstrapped, A lot of 'em are brand new. They're popping up all the time. Every week there's a new one. They're funded by friends and family. They're Oh, we're considering our series A. But the ones that maybe are a little bit further down the roadmap or down the line of having significant funding or have a bigger team, did you give up voting rights? Are you controlled by a venture capital board that maybe is trying to have you shoot for an exit quicker or a liquidity event as opposed to really building out what you know is necessary? So those are some things that I look forward to.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (24:38):

As you can see, Erik is really into this. The only thing I would add is just to say thank you to the founders that if you are in the room, you actually listen to us. You take our calls, you take our meetings, it's appreciated because we have a vision of what we want to have as an advisor to make our job easier, but ultimately, what's going to make the client experience that much better? And so for you to take our feedback, listen to us, and actually implement it, and being agile, it is very valuable and it's something that I'm willing to pay for. So I just want to say thank you. To add to what Shane and Erik has already mentioned.

Rachel Witkowski (25:21):

You were mentioning, Erik, you were talking about jobs. When we're talking about the future of AI, how do you think it will evolve an advisor's job, their daily role?

Erik Allison (25:33):

From an evolution perspective of advisors, I think it's just going to continue what the three of us and many of you in the room have already seen. It's going to allow us to have our time back on tasks that quite frankly we're overqualified to be doing. Technology should be taking that from us so that we can spend 90% of our time in front of clients, in front of prospects, getting to know them better, understanding different avenues that we can serve them. One of the things that I had the privilege of working on back at United Capital was helping build out our behavioral behavioral science side of how we offer services to clients and how do we interact with our clients. And ironically enough, I was talking with a prospect in Florida a couple of weeks ago, and we were looking at an advice engagement as well as management of his portfolio of both private and public investments of about $15 million.

(26:28):

And the question that really shocked me, because most clients and prospects don't ask this, he said, Erik, what experience do you have in helping couples communicate about how they think about money and how that equates to how they make decisions about money? And so I tell that story because how I see the advisor's role inclusive with AI is that we have more time to have those types of conversations that maybe in the past haven't been a part of your practice, maybe haven't been top of mind. Maybe it allows you to start thinking about extra layers of services that can open up new niches in the marketplace, new clients that maybe before you weren't able to connect with, but now you have time to sit down and think about what are some other offerings and other ways I can communicate that clients are wanting and needing and maybe they don't even know that they want to and need it yet.

(27:25):

Little theft from Apple and Steve Jobs. But those are some things that I see how AI is helping the advisor going forward in the future. And I think it's going to continue to evolve where the advisor is going to be less involved in actually building out financial plans and typing in all of different things. Those of you out there do this. We're taking information from one platform to the other to the other, and we're putting it into another, and then we're reviewing it and we're making sure the outputs and the scenario analysis and the cashflow analysis and what the recommendations are are, right? Because just because you have technology doesn't mean it spits out the proper output that you can go in and give advice on. So there's lots of checks and balances that we have a fiduciary duty to provide, but the thing that I'm excited about is that's getting better and better.

(28:22):

We still have to check. We still have to make sure that it's proper and it's right and it's correct, but that process is becoming easier. And what that equates to, it allows me to just spend more time on the golf course with people that I want to get to know it, people that want to get to know me and hey, are you the guy that I want to entrust my family's wealth and future to? Are you the guy that my business needs to be relying on for demand soundboard advice? Because wealth management is a relationship game. So going into where does it look like in the future advisors, don't worry, your job's not going anywhere because people still want that human connection,

(28:59):

But they want you to have more of it. And I love AI because I'm seeing that it's allowing me to spend that quality time better, understanding their needs, better understanding their family, better understanding what events of mine personally should I invite them to barbecue and a pool party around a golf or a charity event for the board I sit on because we're helping out a particular area, reduce poverty. So those are all the things that I'm excited about AI and how I think it's going to continue to evolve the advisor's positioning in the wealth management space.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (29:35):

Well, I have a two part answer to this. One is how I built out my firm this time around. I knew exactly what I needed as the senior wealth advisor. I knew that I needed someone who was senior, someone who had experienced a CFP, and they did not want to sit in client meetings. I was looking for a unicorn, and I'm happy I found him because I knew that there was AI tools that could do a lot of other things. So again, thinking about where I also am in my personal life, I'm a mom of two. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old. I have a husband who just got promoted in his job. We are a two career household. We do not live by family. And I absolutely love what I do. I love my firm. And if there are parents in the audience, especially if you're in the sandwich generation who have aging parents and young kids, you know that your time is constrained and you need every ounce of time that you have.

(30:49):

In my previous firms, we intentionally hire young talent so that we can train them. I have no time for that right now. So I intentionally hire a seasoned advisor so that they can help me with my practice because I don't have time to train. So AI is helping me in that aspect and in that the advisor that I hired, he's doing exactly what he wants to do and have the autonomy of his calendar, not sitting in client meetings and able to do the research and all of that. So I say this is a two part answer because the flip side is we do have a responsibility to make sure that we nurture the next generation of financial advisors that are coming up. I'm very passionate about the next generation because I was once there, I'm 15 years in, but I started off as a paraplanner when paraplanner was a very new term to the wealth management industry.

(31:46):

I helped create and to write the career path of the paraplanners. We were the first generation of paraplanners at the firm I was at 15 years ago. And what do we want our career path to look like? Now it's going to look totally different, but there are skills that I remember learning as a paraplanner without these AI tools that makes me the advisor I am today. So it's up to us as the senior advisors to make sure that those listening skills, those soft skills that make us the great advisors we are today, that the young advisors, the new advisors, that they understand that they still need to hone in those skills because guess what? One day that technology is not going to work. There may be another CrowdStrike that happens and all of our tools aren't working. And so you still need to know how to do your job, whether your AI tool is working or not. So we can't let this handicap us. We can have it help us, but we cannot allow it to handicap us. And again, just as the senior advisors, it is up to us to make sure that we're nurturing and growing the next generation of financial planners in a way that they're not handicapped by AI tools, but they are encouraged and encouraged to use it, but they also know the basic skills that what it means to be a phenomenal financial advisor.

Rachel Witkowski (33:17):

Those are really great points. I have a few minutes here. I wanted to open up to audience questions. Does anybody have a question for our panel?

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (33:30):

We don't bite.

Audience Member 1 (33:31):

Thank you. So obviously there's a lot on this conference around tools for advisors and adoption of the advisor community. Clients are also obviously experimenting with ChatGPT and those sorts of things. I'm curious to hear from you all if there was a product out there that had AI and say like a client portal to be able to ask questions around the data and things that you normally provide, feel comfortable with that at this stage? And if not, why not?

Erik Allison (33:58):

Yeah, I can answer it. Got that in our proprietary portal right now, except the differences is we're not subscribing to it. It's built in house, and so it sits on our platform and we're not sending it out to other servers that aren't in our company. So from a comfort perspective, I'm really comfortable with that. I like on-device access for personal use because it doesn't take client data and send it to anybody else. But that's a really great question. I think it's going to be something that more advisors are going to have and more firms more specifically in their compliance departments are going to have to start taking a look at what are my advisors using without me knowing it? What information are my advisors unknowingly or not understanding that information that they're querying or they're asking about where it's pulling from and where it's going.

(35:01):

There's privacy issues there. So that's a really, really great question. And it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier as this continues to evolve, the compliance departments are going to have a big heavy lift. I mean, I'm doing it personally. I think it starts with me. I'm not waiting for a higher end firm or SEC or anybody to police it. It has to start from what I know is right and what I'm doing. And that's why I'm talking about looking at privacy policies and data restrictions and how are they using the data that we're interacting with. But that's a really good question and it is a concern, and I think firms that are going to continue to have advisors use their own individual products as well as firms that are adopting something on an enterprise level, those are questions they're going to have to ask. But as of right now, today, yeah, advisors should be looking at the small print, the links to the privacy and data policies, and then looking to make sure that your client's data and even your data is not being sent to somewhere that you don't want it to be or that shouldn't be that you didn't give approval to.

Shane Cummings (36:08):

One thing we've done is we put together, for each AI application we've used, we put together what we call an acceptable use policy at the firm level. So in other words, until we've blessed something, we don't allow associates to use it. And we have some tools on our network, on our laptops and our mobile devices, we actually block access to those. So like ChatGPT, you can't go to that on one of our computers. It shuts off the web access to that. So we only have a few of those available right now just because we determined it was too risky to let people just go out and pick on their own what they're going to be using with us not having any insight into what they might be putting client data into or not putting client data into. Just the risk of that is pretty high. We don't want to have to let clients know we leak some of their data or something like that. So I'm pretty happy with that approach to make everybody happy, but I think at least for now, it's a good conservative approach.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (37:12):

Nothing to add.

Rachel Witkowski (37:14):

Any other questions?

Erik Allison (37:15):

Come on, any tough ones?

Rachel Witkowski (37:18):

There you go.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (37:22):

It's a mic coming to you.

Audience Member 2 (37:26):

This may have been partially asked in the last comment that Erik made, but are you advising the clients that you're using AI and how you're using it and having retention agreements signed as it relates to that?

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (37:40):

I couldn't hear the question. You said are we,

Audience Member 2 (37:42):

Are you advising clients how you're using ai, having them sign retention agreements and what the possibility is that you're spiting out information to them? Excuse me. Sorry.

Erik Allison (37:56):

Bless you.

Audience Member 2 (37:57):

Sorry.

Erik Allison (37:58):

I thought maybe you were starting to cry.

Audience Member 2 (37:59):

I know. Sorry, excuse me. Coming on, just advising clients as to how you're using AI and what that looks like in your retention agreements with clients?

Erik Allison (38:09):

Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great question. Nobody's ever asked me that, but we've developed an AI use disclosure that we list out what programs we're using, gives our due diligence and our research on what we've done on the privacy policies and how it aligns with our firm. And we do provide that to clients. And I think it's very smart for any advisor in here, including us on the stage if you guys aren't doing it to implement something like that, disclosure is important, right? Transparency is important. And then what have we done to mitigate risks and how do we relay that to the clients is very important. So the answer to your question, yeah, we've done that. I think we're probably one of the early adopters to do that, but I've never asked had anybody ask that question. But,

Shane Cummings (38:55):

Yeah, in our case,

Erik Allison (38:56):

It's a free tip for everybody to start doing that.

Shane Cummings (38:59):

I would double that. It kind of falls under the purview of our privacy policy right now, but by design, we're not putting any client data into any of the AI tools with the exception of tools like JUMP for transcriptions. And in that case, each time we go into a meeting, we're asking permission as we start that. And obviously then there's also kind of the verbal confirmation that you get when you start that lets the client know just so it's really obvious. And if they don't want to opt into that, then we give them an opportunity to say no. And we don't proceed there, but just so it's very straightforward.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (39:37):

And so we're looking into adopting something that is just straightforward. We're using AI within the firm, and my clients know that I'm very tech forward, and so I'm testing out a lot of different things and I let them know and they're okay with it. I haven't got any pushback from any clients who see a bot come into our meeting or anything. They actually appreciate it.

Erik Allison (40:03):

The crazy thing is though, is that it's not even just AI, right? I mean, if you think about it, just privacy policies, but even just zoom, before Zoom even had their AI summaries that were there, where's that information going when zoom's recording it? Has anybody looked at zoom's privacy policies? So those are other questions. It's the technology age we're in is not just, oh, are we careful about AI? Maybe the AI discussion will encourage us to go back and look at some of the other tech platforms that we're using and double check their disclosures as well. That's been a project that we've been working on too, and I've found some things that quite frankly, I'm not too comfortable with. So it's nice to have something that jolts your memory so that you can think about other things that aren't related to AI as well.

Rachel Witkowski (40:54):

Excellent. Those are really great points. We'll take one more if that's okay.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (41:01):

Right here. We have a question right here.

Audience Member 3 (41:09):

How do your clients take to having their meetings recorded? I have a lot of clients who tell me a lot of personal things that our financial planning part of the meeting takes 10 or 15 minutes, and then the rest of the meeting is all on their personal lives, their kids' lives. One client I'm thinking of has the most screwed up family with the most mental illness in it, and she doesn't want that in anybody anywhere. I mean, I have to take notes on it. I have to remember who's in the hospital and why and suicide attempts and all this junk for her. But I'm wondering how much kickback you get on the recording stuff.

Rianka R. Dorsainvil (41:53):

Yeah, I mean, that's tough. And it sounds like you're an amazing advisor for clients to be able to share that level of personal things that are happening in their life and clients share that level of personal things that are happening with them. I think my clients just have a weird sense of humor because they talk to the bot, they're like, did you hear that? And so I really think it depends on the individual client of if they're going to have pushback or not. And ultimately, we have to respect what the client wishes. And so if the client ultimately says, I really don't want this to be recorded, just hit stop.

Shane Cummings (42:34):

I think in our case, it's about 90%. They're fine with it, 10% not the vast majority are okay with it. One thing we have seen though, you kind of have to be ready for is occasionally you'll get the client that says, oh, I want a copy of that when it's done, knowing that you've made that transcription. So you kind of have to be ready to, are you going to provide that? Do you want to kind retain it internally? But I always say to a client, well, we're going to be taking notes one way or the other, so we're going to capture the data, whether it's an AI doing it or us doing it manually, we're going to have that data somehow. And I think that's probably why it doesn't matter too much at the end of the day.

Erik Allison (43:11):

Yeah, I think real quick for me, I echo a lot of that 90, 95%. Very few aren't okay with it, but there's two other points I'd like to make on that. It goes back to what Rianka said. When I started in the business 16 years ago, I was thrown into helping manage as an RM paraplanner, AKA

(43:31):

Hundred million dollar book of business with a hundred client households and the most complex things you can imagine. And I wouldn't trade that experience for the world because it threw me right into how do you handle all these scenarios as an RM and then as an advisor. But it goes back to what she said about if the power goes out and you're on a phone or you're in a meeting in person and you don't have anything to do these things for you, you have to have those soft skills to be able to know follow up questions and what does that mean to you and why is that so important, and what does it look like if this doesn't happen, what does success look like to you? So those are those questions that I'd mentioned. And then also, the final point I'd say is when I first started, it's also about firm policies and AI is taking away some of the firm policies that were implemented 15 years ago. But when I first started, we always had two people in a meeting.

(44:25):

We had someone running the meeting with the technology and taking the notes, taking copious notes, whereas the main lead advisor was leading the meeting. And that's changing today too. It's very seldom that firms are having two people sit in a meeting because you've got tools. But those are just some comments I'd make because when I started, we didn't have those tools, and so we always had two people in a meeting. One, to just focus on capturing what was important and making sure that we could keep the promises and the obligations that we discussed and made to our clients. And then the other one to be able to drive it because it's tough. I mean, I've done meetings by myself. It's tough to take copious notes, engage with a client or prospect, and make sure you really listen and have that connection while also capturing everything at the same time.

Rachel Witkowski (45:09):

Those were excellent questions. Thank you. Please join me in thanking the panelists today.