This Is an Advisor’s Brain on AI: Prioritizing Critical Choices

Brains can only remember so much. Artificial intelligence could change that.

AI can help the brain do less work, but how much less? Matthew Halloran of Zocks and Joshua Herring of the Longevity Science Foundation took to the stage at the Future Proof Conference in Miami Beach, Florida, this week to discuss how advisors can use AI, and not the other way around. Since AI uptake has skyrocketed, advisors who don’t implement it into their practice risk falling behind and shouldn’t fear outsourcing their thinking to the new technology. In fact, not doing so, say, not recording client meetings, may cause important details to slip through the cracks.

“My brain doesn’t retain as much stuff as it used to,” Halloran said. “I was a therapist before I got into this industry, and when you write things down, you miss stuff. [AI] allows you to not miss stuff.”

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The primary benefit of using AI in client meetings is that it’s an unbiased recorder, which can mean it keeps track of information an advisor might block from their memory, Halloran said. If a client says something that’s triggering for an advisor, they may forget what was said afterwards, he added. “When you have a really great AI tool in the background, it is listening without prejudice,” he said. The danger stems from offloading important decisions; critical thinking should never be automated, Herring said. This can be mitigated by taking notes at the same time as the AI. “What the data suggests is that the best thing you can do, and this is a bit of a contradiction, is actually take those notes and have an AI notetaker take notes alongside you,” Herring said. This is because a person will notice things — inflections, body language, enthusiasm — that a robot never can, and the advisor should know what’s most important to their client without them having to necessarily say it outright.

But although AI notetaking in financial planning meetings is on the rise, it’s far from universal. According to a recent Kitces report:

• Less than 20% of advisors actually reported using AI notetaking tools.
• Advisors who do use notetakers are split roughly in half: those who use generic, non-advisor-specific tools (like Zoom’s built-in option), and those who use tech meant for financial professionals, like Jump or FinMate AI.

Tedium. The way to tell the difference between what should and shouldn’t be offloaded is in how tedious the work is, Halloran said. This can be particularly relevant if, say, the advisor has to enter the same bit of data in several different places. “The probability of mistakes is exponentially higher, where if you’re outsourcing that to something that is actually built for that … I just think that effort is a really good thing,” Halloran said.