Guide
AI for financial advisors: what your systems already added
Most of the software you run has added AI features in the last two years. Some of it, including two of the big planning programs, hasn't. Many of the new features arrived quietly, in a release note, and some cost extra.
Meanwhile, someone in your office may already be using a chatbot on a personal account, with nothing written down about it.
Three separate questions that get mixed up
- What do we already own? It's the cheapest question to answer and the one with the best return. There's often something useful sitting on your current plan, unused.
- What's worth buying? Meeting notes, client messaging, tax and portfolio analysis. These are real products with real prices, and some of them are cheap.
- What have we allowed, and who checks it? This is a management question: what you've decided, and whether any of it is on paper.
Keep them apart. Each one has a different answer, a different cost and a different urgency.
The notetaker question
Software that listens to a client meeting and writes the notes is a crowded category. Don't start with which one is best. Ask this:
Does it write back into your client database automatically, or does somebody still copy and paste? If it writes back, it removes work. If it doesn't, you get a transcript and the work stays where it was.
Next, ask what happens to the recording and the transcript afterward, given your recordkeeping obligations. Your compliance consultant has to answer that one, but you need to know what the product actually does before you can ask them properly.
What's worth taking first
Whatever your software vendors publish about their own products is free and accurate. Their advice isn't neutral, because they're selling the modules, but nobody knows their own settings better. Read it before you pay anyone.
Your custodian may run AI education for advisers. Schwab does: a program called Advisor AI in Action, with monthly webcasts and in-person summits for its advisers, plus a paid executive course run with Stanford. It's general and won't cover your specific plan tiers. Ask your relationship manager for the link.
What we'd do first
- List what you pay for and which tier you're on. Open the billing screens and write it down. That list is useful on its own.
- Find out what people are already doing. Ask neutrally, so you get the true answer.
- Turn on the things you already own. It's free, and it tells you whether any of this helps before you spend anything.
- Write down what's happening now. You don't need a policy yet.
- Then buy something, once, for one specific problem.
Want somebody to go through it with you?
The audit is a few sessions on a screen share, then a written report naming what to switch on, what to buy, and what to leave alone. We won't ask for client records.