Advisors who use AI are saving time. Now they need to decide what to do with it.Alfieri/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
An advisor posted online recently that “getting home earlier” was the most compelling use case for artificial intelligence they had come across. The response to the post was overwhelmingly positive. And honestly, I get why.
There are only so many hours in the day and getting some of them back is a worthy goal. AI is making that possible, so the enthusiasm is understandable.
But there’s a bigger conversation advisors should be having.
The financial advice industry has developed something of an obsession with AI over the past few months. Every conference has a panel on it; every vendor has bolted it onto their product. Advisors are using it to take notes and draft e-mails, among other tasks. So, if you’re spending five hours a week on something AI can handle in five minutes, recovering that time is valuable.
The question I keep coming back to is: What are we planning to do with that time once we have it?
Most of the conversation in our industry is focused on how AI can help us do existing tasks faster. That framing is understandable, but it’s also limiting. It assumes the work we’re already doing is the only work we should be doing, and that the goal is simply to do it more efficiently. Faster notes, more clients, more revenue. The same practice, optimized. And for a lot of advisors, that’s probably where the thinking stops.
We should think a little further than that.
When AI removes the friction from the tasks consuming our time, it doesn’t just make us more productive – it creates capacity for things we’ve never been able to do. That’s a different kind of opportunity and it deserves a different kind of question. Not, “How do I do what I already do, faster?” but “What would my practice look like if the constraint of time largely disappeared?”
Practically speaking, that question looks different for every advisor. Which clients have not heard from you as often as they deserve? How many of your client relationships are shallower than they should be – not because you don’t care, but because there is never enough time? Which people have never had access to real financial advice because the economics of serving them never made sense for your business? These are not hypothetical questions. Most of us already have answers, but have quietly dismissed them.
AI doesn’t answer those questions for you, but it does give you room to act on them.
The future I find most compelling is not one in which advisors are simply more profitable because they’re moving faster. It’s one in which advisors are doing things that were not previously possible. Those things include:
- more proactive client outreach;
- deeper and more personalized planning;
- conversations with clients’ families;
- meaningful engagement with clients who don’t meet the traditional asset thresholds and have historically been kept out of the advice relationship entirely.
These are not efficiency gains. They expand what your advisory practice can look like.
Getting home earlier is a real and legitimate benefit of AI, and nobody should feel guilty for wanting it. But it’s a modest ambition for a technology that has the potential to change the nature of what we do and for whom we do it.
The advisors who will look back on this moment with the most satisfaction are not the ones who automated their businesses and called it a day. They’re the ones who looked at AI and the time it returned to them, and asked a bigger question about what to do with it. Not for their own sake, but for their clients.
Diandra Camilleri is an associate portfolio manager with Verecan Capital Management Inc. in Burlington, Ont.