AI Meets Advisory

Speaker 1 – 00:00
Welcome to EWA’s FinLit podcast. EWA is a fee only RIA based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We hope all listeners
of this podcast will benefit as we deep dive into complex financial topics that we will make simplified for you. And
we hope that this really serves as a catalyst so that you can make the best financial planning decisions for your
family and also save time. Foreign Excited to be joined by Jameson and Chris from EWA Team. And today we’re
talking all things AI. Will AI replace financial advisors? How can clients. If you’re needing financial advice, how can
you utilize AI? How could you utilize AI? With the help of a financial advisor, we’re going to be covering all the topics.
So right off the bat, Jameson, Chris, how do you guys use AI on a day to day basis?
Speaker 2 – 00:57
Basically replaced my googling. You can give me answer much quicker and much more detailed. Specifically for
what I’m asking, I’d say that’s the biggest any research, any learning. I use it for a lot of learning. Like there’s times in
my even just in business like you know, I have to research a detailed. I just did this last night actually. I had to
research a detailed tax code And I know 80 to 90% of it. And instead of spending an hour on sifting through articles
on Google, it gave me the answer in three minutes.
Speaker 1 – 01:32
How do you know that that answer was accurate though?
Speaker 2 – 01:35
I mean it puts the sources in.
Speaker 1 – 01:37
There so then you go to the sources you can.
Speaker 2 – 01:39
Yeah, but again I knew 80 to 90% of it and then so it was like okay, yeah, this checks out, this makes sense. And
there’s been times where I’ve done that and then I’ve consulted like Tyler, cpa, someone that’s the actual expert and
then that saves me calling him for an hour. It’s a three minute phone call.
Speaker 1 – 01:55
Okay, yeah, so we do have an enterprise like for the EWA team and so you actually I don’t know if everyone know you
get charged based upon it’s like a monthly fee but then you get charged by the use of what’s called the tokens, like
the energy that it takes to answer questions. So one time I walked in, Chris was in Jameson’s office I think. Yeah, it
was James in the office and I was like what are you guys doing? So we’re deep research right now there chat was
doing, you know, can make these pictures and so they were trying to make Jameson’s dog dressed as an astronaut.
Speaker 2 – 02:24
I think I got him as a doctor, an astronaut clown, Napoleon Bonaparte signing The Declaration of Independence, a lot
of things.
Speaker 1 – 02:31
I’m just glad the tokens were going to good use. Yeah, the astronaut one looks pretty cool.
Speaker 2 – 02:35
You used to design your office, didn’t you?
Speaker 3 – 02:36
I did use it to design the offense masters was recently I put the green jacket on my puppy Tony. So yeah there’s
plenty of financial stuff, plenty of stuff that you can do with AI.
Speaker 1 – 02:48
It’s really okay. Well Chris, how else do you use it on a day to day basis?
Speaker 3 – 02:53
I mean I think pretty similar to Jameson. We do similar role here. So anything from like tax code I think is a good
example. Really dry stuff that could be long documents. You can plug it in there, ask it questions and it’s better than
just googling something that’ll point you to like Investopedia or something because you can dig deeper and have a
conversation and build on a prompt that you’re using so it can take all that context that you’re trying to figure out or
think through for somebody’s situation and just do a better job and be more time efficient I think.
Speaker 2 – 03:26
And I, I would say I like really enjoy like I love learning new things but I really do enjoy like deep like research which
can like send me down a rabbit on random things can send me down a rabbit hole where I spend like hours. And so
I’ve been using the deep research lately. I just did this last night too. So you basically ask it something and then it
produced a 20 page like report. It put all these studies and on the topic it was like here’s a 20 page report that saved
me hours like gave me like a college grade like research paper.
Speaker 3 – 03:57
You got shut down. Right? So you can only use the deep research.
Speaker 2 – 04:00
Yeah, and I didn’t know that. So when it first came out I was just hammering the deep research. I put time out. I used
it too much.
Speaker 1 – 04:07
It was burning time out. We needed to have a timeout system here at ewa. Yeah, timeout from chat GPT.
Speaker 2 – 04:14
Well how are you using? You use it a lot.
Speaker 1 – 04:16
Yeah, similar. Anytime I email you guys it’s usually not me. No, I’m just kidding. No, it’s I, I think it’s similar, I think the
most and I’ve heard this from a lot of mentors and you know, business owner friends. The best thing is not to have it
do work for you. It’s have it act as a strat, you know, strategy, say eliminate, you know, say cut. It cuts down times.
Ultimately I still want to make the decision and then it helps analyze data. It’s like we’ll do team meetings together
and then it’ll analyze all the action items after this team meeting. So I think the dictation service you can put in any
kind of meeting and then that itself will come up with summary.
Speaker 1 – 04:52
But putting it in a customized GPT so you can come up with like the follow ups, we use that internally and then also
if we have like a survey of any call we’ll remove, we always remove the personal identifiable information. They take
names out. But then if we have a survey of like 10 questions and ask it to analyze, hey, where can we improve? Like
we just did like an EWA tax survey and the first day results and we got like 35 responses like immediately. And so I
put it in there and you know, took out the cell with people’s names. A lot of people were anonymous, put it in there
and then it analyzed. Here’s what you did great, here’s what you needed versus like me going cell by cell.
Speaker 1 – 05:24
So I mean that alone is just a quick probably 20 or 30 minutes saved. So tasks like that, I think the important part is
just removing all the personal identifal information because there’s still some security concerns and to save time on
those tasks as well. So I guess the next question is do you think AI will replace, will there be disruption in our
industry? Will it replace financial advisors and if so, who’s, who will be replaced, who will not be replaced, et cetera.
What do you guys think?
Speaker 3 – 05:52
Yeah, I think some areas definitely. I think AI is really good at like data driven tasks. So a lot of stuff that might just
be historically like tedious stuff that just takes you time to do. I think a lot of that would be hopefully taken care of
and more efficient with AI. But I think the human touch, the connection aspect of knowing the full context of
someone’s plan, I might take some time to get there.
Speaker 1 – 06:20
But yeah, absolutely, I would echo that. I think that like in the, if you’re a financial advisor just doing wealth
management or just doing one thing, I think you’re a huge subject. But if you’re, I think we’re pretty well insulated.
We’re leaning heavily into AI. We’re actually developing a tool right now inside of, not through like the deep sinkhole
of chatgpt but like using that same tech inside of Microsoft Azure. So we own the data and it’s not eliminating the
LLM system where it’s learning off each other. We’re just in our ecosystem so it’s totally secure.
Speaker 1 – 06:55
So, so we can, you know, get data quickly from our secure environment and I think that’s gonna really help and that
the goal of that will actually to be us to you know, eliminate the need for like I would say like a support advisor, like a
paralegal or like a. So some of like the second roles this can do when you’re going to do all this time oriented tasks
where it can like extract information so quickly for you. So that’ll be really important. So I think as far as financial
advisors, it’s gonna make really good ones that do a lot of high value stuff for clients, a lot more efficient. And it’s
gonna, in my opinion, our field, it’s gonna eliminate a lot of the repetitive tasks that you know, anyone can come in,
get trained really quickly to do.
Speaker 1 – 07:34
But if you have the knowledge and then the tools, it’s kind of like the, a steroid that’s get, that’s going into your
productivity that a good advisor with high value propositions will not only not be replaced, they’ll be enhanced.
Enhanced dramatically.
Speaker 3 – 07:50
I think it would, I’m grateful it’s coming along now because I think all the things that you’re describing, I wouldn’t have
probably gotten my job in college working with you because I think it’s a lot of the, like you said, the support advisor
stuff that.
Speaker 1 – 08:05
And that’s where you started for three or four years.
Speaker 2 – 08:07
Yeah.
Speaker 3 – 08:07
So timing worked out. But all that stuff that you’re describing, like probably wouldn’t have been a job I think.
Speaker 1 – 08:13
But you guys lucked out a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I was before ChatGPT.
Speaker 3 – 08:19
He would have been all over that for sure.
Speaker 2 – 08:21
Yeah, I said this last night when I was doing that debrief. I was like this, if I had this in college, I probably would have
dropped out of college because I’d be like, I can just learn what I need right here. Like what am I sitting in this
classroom anyway? Yeah, no, I have a lot of thoughts on what’s gonna do to the industry. I mean I think that the
average age of a financial advisor, I think like 60 years old. So it’s an old industry. There is. TACA’s very behind in
general, we’re pretty ahead of the curve. But for the most part advisors are like a lot of advisors that still use fax
machines. Just like think about that for a second and use wet signatures on everything. Like it’s very outdated.
Speaker 2 – 08:59
So I can come in and get the tech up to speed for a lot of advisors. So that’s one way another way, there’s a huge
talent shortage for financial advisors. Again, average age is like 60. There’s a lot of young people that are not going
into the field. It’s been newer now that there’s colleges that offer, you know, CFP prerequisites and planning
certificates and stuff. But I think with that data, with that talent gap shortage that’s happening, this will help.
Because if you’re like you said, if you’re just doing portfolio management, investment management, I mean robo
advisors have been around for 10 years. Like they can already, I can already do that. But with client, with advisors
that are doing very complex detailed work like we are, we’re handling a lot, you know, estate planning, taxes, many
different things.
Speaker 2 – 09:54
It’s going to allow client advisors to work with more clients because like what you said, a lot of the tedious
monotonous work can get outsourced to this new tech that’s coming in. And now instead of working with 100
clients, you work with 200 and give them that same level of service where you may not have been before because
you’re hand holding, giving a white glove service. And then what I think in general, will it take our jobs some? Yes. I
think that any complex high net worth person, even if AI can do some of the planning, there’s always going to need to
be a human element to make big decisions, to have the relationship. But there’s a big gap in the industry. I think that
the terms actually mass affluent, which is like net worth between like 250,000 to like a million.
Speaker 2 – 10:46
And that’s like majority of the population is right there. But there’s a big gap in advisory services for those types of
people because very good financial advisors are expensive and you have, and if you’re under the AUM model, you
have to have assets to be able to have access to. And there’s a lot of advisors like you know, could name a lot that
don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of, there’s a huge category of the industry that are just not solid financial
advisors.
Speaker 1 – 11:13
Do you need to rein him in a little bit?
Speaker 3 – 11:15
No, no, he’s good.
Speaker 1 – 11:16
He’s just let him go.
Speaker 2 – 11:17
So for those people, it’s like the people that are in that net worth range, they could go to the subpar advisors and get
bad advice and they’re probably going to sell a product and annuity and insurance product or as this tech develops, I
think there’s an opportunity that AI and large language models can give basic Advice and again nothing complex but
as far as how do I pay down debt, what accounts do I save into, how do I budget? I think those are the little things
that AI is going to be able to do which will eliminate low level financial advisors.
Speaker 1 – 11:53
Yeah, I agree with a lot of that actually all of it but I think so just quick vision of how I see the future going is the you
know clients expect us to try to minimize fees and try to provide as much value as possible. And that’s the name of
the game that we’re trying to do is provide as much value as possible for as little fee as possible. Right. And that’s
where you attract and we have that high retention rate like 99.9%. But the other thing I think instead of like being
scared about this, we have to lean into it. So not only do you know are we developing an internal tool, compliance
tested, security tested, you know, data tested but it’s also going to be something I think the stage two making
available for clients.
Speaker 1 – 12:39
So we have all this secure data, years of meetings and you know, in.
Speaker 3 – 12:44
Our.
Speaker 1 – 12:46
You know, different systems and think about if you’re a client instead of going to chat GPT and like throwing in your
tax return, like having your information available for who knows what is having that in a secure environment where
we’ve done your taxes, we have your, you know, your net worth and now you have access where you can have a
personal relationship with advisor. But any quick questions you need you can pull right from it and utilize AI inside of
a secure environment. That’s really where I see where we’re going and where the world where. I don’t know if the
industry is going to go there but I think that’s the most beneficial and safe use case if you’re a high net worth client is
having a firm that can offer that to you.
Speaker 2 – 13:25
Yeah, I think that’s a win for us and a win for clients. Like last night it was 6:30pm I got a text from a client that said
we’re dollar cost averaging cash into the market right now. And it was a quick question like how much cash do I have
in the portfolio? I didn’t see it for 30 or 40 minutes. I was doing stuff and then he ended up responding. I said
nevermind, I found it. But imagine if he had a chatbot that had all of his information live.
Speaker 1 – 13:50
Link to his portfolio.
Speaker 2 – 13:51
Instead of waiting for me to respond he could just ask it how much cash do I have? Boom, he gets answer
immediately and saves everybody Time and then say.
Speaker 1 – 14:00
Hey and uses that hey, can you draft an email to my advisor? I’m a little bit scared of the market right now. Yeah, I
have this other big purchase. I think I want a dollar, I think I want to slow down my dollar cost average or slow down
my whatever it is and then they can draft that, you can get the information, pull it and draft an email back. And so it’s
still. Then you call instead of you oh hang on for five minutes while I look up all this information. It’s just like you’re
just being respectful of each other’s time.
Speaker 2 – 14:24
Now that person’s not, you know, he may not say, he may not ask the chat bot how do I negotiate this contract in xyz.
That’s super complex. Yeah, he still got a call us for it. But the very basic simple questions but.
Speaker 1 – 14:38
With that in that example will have the last contract on file and say hey, upload an Excel spreadsheet of your Last
trailing month 12 RVUs. Can you pull up my contract? What I did, here’s MGMA data that would put in his file. If he’s a
hand surgeon or whatever he is, put it all in there and then Chad will say here’s where the industry is, here’s where
you are. And then that’ll jumpstart the conversation between you and him.
Speaker 2 – 15:02
Make the decision.
Speaker 1 – 15:02
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 – 15:03
So I think, yeah, I think it’s a long ways away from doing very complex things. I don’t know if it’ll ever, I mean again, I
don’t know who knows where this.
Speaker 1 – 15:11
I don’t think it’s going to do complex things. I think it’s going to take complex topics, complex tasks, complex
discussions and cut down the time needed to address them by 90%.
Speaker 2 – 15:20
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 15:21
So it’ll take 10% of the time to address the human interaction between that high level financial advisor and the hand
to negotiate that contract to do whatever it needs to be done. But you’re going to do it in 10 minutes instead of like
three different 60 minute meetings. That makes sense.
Speaker 2 – 15:35
Yeah. And I think too like, I mean I don’t again, I don’t know where this is going to go the tech but like I don’t think I’d
want to default every big decision to an AI.
Speaker 1 – 15:45
I just want it to be there to enhance it to save time still.
Speaker 2 – 15:48
Yeah, humans are gonna make the decision.
Speaker 1 – 15:49
Absolutely. No question. Yeah, no, we’re excited. We’re in the process of rolling this out and so Chris, you’ve been
pretty silent over you’re thinking about your. Your green jacket on your dog.
Speaker 3 – 16:00
Yeah. Still the important stuff with AI what.
Speaker 1 – 16:04
About some financial stuff? Anything on your.
Speaker 3 – 16:08
I think it does a good job with info that’s already out there. Devin and I another advisor on the team we just met with
somebody that is covered by a government pension and this is something that’s easy to do. We could still calculate
benefits by hand but it has. You can pull all that info from the online the actual government sources and we can run
five different pension scenarios.
Speaker 2 – 16:33
And instead of building spreadsheets.
Speaker 1 – 16:35
Right.
Speaker 3 – 16:36
Which could have user error. We still check it and make sure it’s right. But it cuts down the time and just helps us put
those models together a lot quicker.
Speaker 1 – 16:44
Yeah. So let’s talk about. I think there’s a use case now where you know were the. The. The business of handling
money and you know telling people like enjoy life now but also save for the future. I’ve. I’ve used it personally for a lot
of simple ways to save money. Example you know designing just moved into a new house and like designing the
rooms and the paint colors and all that I could have paid an architect or whatever an interior designer $10,000. I just
had chat gbt do most of the designs and it pulls the links of the furniture and like with all thin budget so that’s one
way I think with any kind of house project it’s.
Speaker 1 – 17:18
It’s pretty incredible what the capabilities are any kind of contract like I’m thinking of doing a backyard project and
like there’s two different you know prices I got and it broke it down. Here’s the difference between them and that
helped me negotiate and I saved 20% off of the higher end person they didn’t get make it down quite to the lower end
person but it helped saved 20 because when I presented the data is like oh my goodness like he knows exactly what
he’s talking about. What else do you think? If you’re advising a client on how they can utilize AI securely what other
use cases to either save time or save money do you guys have?
Speaker 2 – 17:54
I thought this was one of the coolest ways I’ve used it. I so I’m pretty like I don’t know diligent about like diet and
what I’m eating. And so I was about a month ago I put in okay here’s my based on the data from my whoop. And then
there’s calculations you can do online based on height, weight, age, what my I forget the term for it’s metabasal rate
or something? Basically whatever calories you need to burn every day.
Speaker 1 – 18:24
It’s like metabolic maintenance, something.
Speaker 2 – 18:26
Yeah. And so I said, okay, my daily calorie burns 2100 calories. I want to be at a 300 calorie surplus per day. Here’s
what I’ve been eating on a day to day, as far as, you know, each meal. And I said, how do you. How do we dial this in
to get X amount grams of protein, x calories? Give me a direct grocery shopping list. And then is it better? Should I
outsource this to a meal prep service or should I just cook this and like, meal prep? And I mean, it gave me a crazy
detailed.
Speaker 1 – 18:57
What did it end up doing? What was the result? Are you meal prepping? Are you outsourcing it?
Speaker 2 – 19:01
Meal prepping? I got a butcher box subscription, so pay a couple hundred bucks a month, you get a bunch of meat in
a box, all organic, grass fed, frozen. And then twice a week, I just cook a bunch of steaks and ground turkey and wear
whatever I want, and then I have it.
Speaker 1 – 19:16
We get a butcher box.
Speaker 3 – 19:18
Is that an ad?
Speaker 1 – 19:19
Is this an ad? Are we getting paid for this podcast now?
Speaker 2 – 19:21
No, it’s just a great product.
Speaker 1 – 19:22
Okay. All right, just checking.
Speaker 3 – 19:24
No free ads.
Speaker 1 – 19:26
But yeah, call them, make them pay for that. All right, Chris, how about you? What other ways would you say clients
could utilize it from a cost or time saving perspective?
Speaker 3 – 19:38
Yeah, you can download your transaction history from all the cards and you could throw it in there and it would, you
know, can put together a really good budget that you’d otherwise have to scrub yourself.
Speaker 1 – 19:47
And so organize your spending habits and make you aware and make you just.
Speaker 3 – 19:52
Understanding where your money’s going. Yeah, so that’s been very helpful. Other, you know, that’s where we’ve had
to pull. People sometimes use one credit card. People use 10. So it’s. It could be a mess. And if you’re going through
it by hand, it’s. It’s hard.
Speaker 1 – 20:05
Maybe double. That’s easy because you can get that in Excel. You can remove any personal identifier information
and say, hype it. You know, don’t have to give names. You can just do it. Right?
Speaker 3 – 20:13
Well, it’s always just if you pull those, it just shows date, amount.
Speaker 1 – 20:17
It doesn’t even show names.
Speaker 3 – 20:17
Yeah, so it’s.
Speaker 1 – 20:19
Yeah, that’s awesome.
Speaker 3 – 20:20
Way faster.
Speaker 1 – 20:21
So incredible. Incredible. Okay, what else? Can you guys think of any other. If you’re, if you’re an AI advisor for clients
trying to say, hey, here’s how to save time or money.
Speaker 3 – 20:30
I like the contract one. Whether it’s an employment agreement, an apartment lease I think you’ve used for that. I got
an HOA document that was like 180 pages and I just dumped it into Chat. And it just does what you needed to know.
Yeah, it does a really good job boiling it down. Like all the legal talk it translates that to. You can even prompt it like
explain this to like a 10 year old.
Speaker 2 – 20:54
Yeah, I like that one. I’ll say explain it to a golden retriever or an elementary school student.
Speaker 3 – 20:58
You’ll have like a tax code that’s explain it to. Yeah, so it does a good job simplifying things.
Speaker 2 – 21:04
I mean I’ve been using it a lot to figure out how like car insurance works and these claims and I’m getting real
detailed into, you know, the insurance industry personally.
Speaker 1 – 21:12
So Jameson just got his car to got ran over by a 17 year old.
Speaker 2 – 21:15
Ran a red light, hit me. Luckily everybody’s safe. Could have been a lot.
Speaker 3 – 21:19
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 21:20
You hit your girlfriend’s side too?
Speaker 2 – 21:21
Cars most likely. Not. Not for sure yet. Most likely. But yeah. I didn’t realize how insane auto insurance was but chat’s
like broken it down. Here’s what like you know what how this works with the processes. There’s little things that
would take hours of research is you know, quick.
Speaker 1 – 21:37
Yeah I’ve noticed like I have a business coach and like we’ll transcribe the conversations and I’ll remove you know,
names and then put it in there and it’ll summarize like the. I don’t, I’m not using it to replace anything right now. I’m
using it to otherwise enhance like 10x the results that business cuts. Like during a business we have an hour
session, it’s really busy. Then I’m like implement 1 out of 10 things but now it’s like it breaks it down that gives an
action plan and does all the homework for me and now I just have to execute it so it really saves hours of time. So
huge believer in the creating a customized GPT that gets trained on what you’re trying to do.
Speaker 1 – 22:11
So like I have one for health for example I have one for coach of one for certain financial decisions and none of them
are making decisions. It’s just to enhance the data pool and the summaries so that I, I don’t have decision fatigue
and I have more energy to actually spend time rather than doing all the work to analyze the analysis is done. Now I
get to really think about the strategy. Thanks for tuning in to our podcast. Hopefully you found this helpful. Really
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