Blog posts, emails and videos are among the numerous ways generative AI has entered advisors’ lives over the past 18 months.
Jason Pereira, senior partner and financial planner at Woodgate Financial, reviewed these and several other uses advisors can immediately put into practice at WealthStack, part of Wealth Management EDGE at The Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood Beach, Fla.
Pereira began by showing a snippet from the “Terminator” movies to illustrate the more dystopian view many hold of the future of AI.
“We are hard-wired to fear change,” he said. “From an evolutionary perspective, change can kill us. Every technological development in history has been met with fear.”
Instead, he said, advisors should view AI as a tool that can be used for good or ill.
“A hammer can hammer a nail or smash a skull,” he said. “Don’t fear it. Think about how we can make it better. AI is no different than every other tool that we have today. It has no ethics.”
Pereira then showed a video of how he asked ChatGPT to create the code for a PowerPoint presentation on the topic he was presenting. Within seconds, the chatbot spit back slide after slide featuring titles, bullet points and speaker notes. He then copied and pasted the code into PowerPoint. After executing the script, he suddenly had six slides of text. Afterward, he added images created with Beautiful.AI to illustrate the finished product.
He then pointedly sat on stage while he played realistic audio of his voice from Descript and a video from a company called HeyGen. It appeared to be Pereira speaking but was an entirely artificial deepfake. He then showed the same video again, this time in Mandarin.
On the more practical side, Pereira showed the results of a query on the AI chatbot Perplexity. He then pasted it into an email enabled with the AI writing assistant GrammarlyGO. The AI began to correct the grammar of the other AI.
“Two AIs may get into a fight,” he said.
Other tools, like ChatPDF, can read PDFs and answer using the information in the file. ARQA AI is a similar program designed for the wealth management industry, and it is also trained to extract pertinent client information from PDFs.
Fathom AI can record meetings, generate transcriptions and earmark certain parts of the conversation.
Conquest Planning’s AI capabilities can help advisors develop a financial plan using algorithms, one strategy at a time.
“It’s checking a substantial number of variables for each strategy,” he said. "This will allow good planners how to be better planners.”
Estate planning tools that use AI, including Wealth.com, Holistiplan and FP Alpha, can read estate documents and extract useful information.
Pereira said these advancements will allow advisors to spend more time with clients while better understanding their needs. Those who don’t use these tools are likely to be left behind.
“The way we’ve done business in the past is dead, just like the way we did business 20 years ago is dead,” he said.