Forbes Research found that 76% of C-suite leaders in the financial services sector use, or plan to use, AI to increase productivity and operational efficiency. Pereira sees a similar opportunity for financial professionals.
“The technological changes that are coming to us with AI are probably the most meaningful ones since the dawn of the internet,” says Pereira. He encourages financial professionals to change their mindset to take advantage of these.
“First and foremost, be an entrepreneur. … Start understanding what’s out there, playing around with stuff, looking around, whatever it takes.”
While the productivity gains from AI are tantalizing, financial professionals must approach these powerful new technologies with care and responsibility.
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Your first client of the day asks for an overview of their retirement plan, including the current status of their savings, the performance of their investment portfolio and the projected income they can expect in later life.
Pereira says generative AI is ideally suited to helping financial professionals turn their insights and analysis into reports or documents that are “visual, engaging, interactive and easily understood by a client.”
You use AI software to transform the client’s records and your commentary into a report with charts and graphs illustrating savings growth and income forecasts. This makes it simple for your client to visualize their financial future. The software also ensures you adopt user-friendly terms to explain complicated topics.
“At the end of the day, we get bogged down with our own [terminology]. … Every report should pass the grandma test—if my grandma can't understand it, it’s too complex,” says Pereira.
A morning of meetings is complete, and AI tools have continued to help reduce your workload.
One virtual meeting was recorded with a client’s permission, and the conversation has already been turned into text using an online AI transcription service. Handwritten notes from an in-person meeting have been scanned and converted into a digital transcript. AI has analyzed these records to suggest actions for you, such as following up on a specific issue raised by a client. Scheduling software uses AI to scan your calendar and clients’ calendars to propose the best date and time for your next call or in-person meeting.
These new capabilities could have significant implications for your back-office headcount. “I'm not saying that [AI software is at] a stage right now where an assistant's going to be completely replaced,” says Pereira, “but the assistant may be able to be faster, and maybe I go from three assistants...to two.”
As you prepare for your next meeting, you feel relaxed and focused, knowing AI has already carried out much of the heavy lifting.
It’s an in-person appointment with a bereaved client. AI-enabled software has scanned all of your previous interactions—such as meeting notes and client emails—to create a digestible summary of the client’s financial situation.
Reducing this administrative burden frees up time for you to “more deeply understand clients and help them self-actualize,” Pereira says.
In addition, given the delicate nature of this appointment, Pereira adds that you may even use an AI chat interface to coach you on tone, word choice and topic pacing. “I could say something like, ‘They just lost their spouse. Help guide me through what a meeting with them would look like.’”
You sit down to write the latest edition of an email newsletter that you use to help drive awareness of your services and expertise.
Before sending it, you feed it into an AI chatbot for review and ask questions such as, “Is this post clear to my intended audience?” and “How could I make this more unique and engaging?” The feedback is like having a personal editor who helps you craft your professional opinion to stand out from the crowd.
Pereira urges people to avoid using generative AI to create forgettable, low-value content and instead ask themselves: “Am I legitimately providing value with the effort I'm putting in?”
He adds, “The best way to look at [generative AI] is that this is a caddy. … At the end of the day, the [financial professional is] still the golfer.”
A client calls your office toward the end of the day. They’ve just emailed their tax return and would like to know how the money moves you suggested in the previous year impacted their tax liability.
Figuring this out would once have been an arduous task. Comparing two tax returns to determine if a strategy paid off is representative of the kind of tedious work AI is well suited to absorb.
Now, you use AI tools to quickly analyze and compare tax returns, highlighting the impact of specific financial decisions on the client’s tax liability. This allows for a swift, detailed explanation of how each suggested move affected them.
“I could…bring that back to them and say, ‘Hey, thanks for that. By the way, here's how this progressed from last year. And by the way, these strategies we put into place, this was the impact,’” says Pereira.
Swaner urges financial professionals to avoid sharing a client’s identity with generative AI tools. “Instead, simply anonymize the inputs or leave off identifying data.” He says people should “know and trust” their tools and suggests using paid-for versions of reputable AI software.
Financial professionals typically have an approach that they prefer—generative AI tools might have a different plan,” says Swaner. He suggests using tailored instructional prompts and templates to explain your approach and preferences to an AI system to ensure alignment.
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Professionals should use generative AI as background to prepare their work and avoid directly using the output of AI tools in customer communication. “If a professional uses AI-generated content, they should explicitly disclose the authorship,” he says.
Generative AI tools rarely admit when they don’t know something. Instead, they often fill gaps with best guesses, so be on guard. “[They] always answer with confidence, even when they are wrong,” says Swaner. “Be sure to double-check every detail for accuracy.”