Chris Warner sees past the AI hype, to the small areas where this tech can make life easier, he argues its transformative promise lies in those small wins
Each month at WP we offer a slate of articles and content pieces that go deep on a particular topic. This November, we’re exploring the uses of artificial intelligence in wealth management.
Chris Warner believes that advisors fight a daily battle to spend more time in front of their clients. The Wealth Advisor and Client Relationship Manager at Nicola Wealth estimates that for an advisor specializing in a higher net worth clientele, only about ten to twenty per cent of that advisor’s time is spent in front of the client. The rest of their time is ploughed into admin, research, execution, compliance, and all the tiny time-consuming tasks that pull them away from where they want to be. Warner believes that this imbalance of time is where generative AI tools can drive the greatest value for advisors.
Warner’s view is that generative AI can add efficiency to almost any task an advisor does, if used correctly. For all the ways gen AI is talked about as a full-blown transformative force for every industry it touches, Warner doesn’t believe that transformation is going to be immediate or revolutionary. In fact, he argues that a greater benefit can come from the slow addition of AI-driven efficiencies than the wholesale replacement of systems or people with an AI tool that still skews towards imperfection.
“There's literally nothing you can't integrate some degree of AI into for some minor efficiency gains,” Warner says. “When I talk to people who are AI novices, they think AI is going to do their work for them. But really what it's going to do is it's going to help you do everything just a little bit faster. So it's like the gradual accretion of marginal gains, which we do to be more efficient.”
Warner is already using generative AI tools to speed his research and communication processes. He’s found efficiency using AI to find old CRA rulings and to take large data sets and compile them into a workable pieces his clients can read easily. While an accomplished writer and trained journalist himself, Warner notes that generative AI tools can ensure his communication meets a certain desired tone without having to spend hours poring over his emails.
While Warner’s firm is still in the pilot phase of using AI notetaking for client meetings, he notes that many clients have been requesting to bring their own notetakers into meetings. Many of his clients are physicians and they’ve already begun using AI transcription in their work. Now, he says, they’re applying them in their advisor conversations, demonstrating a willingness among many clients to use these tools as well.
Nicola Wealth, Warner explains, already uses an enterprise subscription to Microsoft Co-Pilot, which operates as a gated internal tool to ensure data security for clients. While he’s experimented with broad public tools to gain a grasp on generative AI, he says that the internal tool is advantageous both for its safety and for its capacity to pull out snippets of client data stored in secure internal sources. It can pull from an obscure end of a client’s T2 corporate tax filing and help Warner put that information in context in a piece of client communication.
It's taken work to get the AI tool to be that useful, though. Warner notes that he’s had to train his AI tools to avoid pitfalls like the use of hypothetical data. Just like training a colleague, he’s had to give the AI tool feedback on how it sources data, how it writes, and what it appears to infer. As he’s given the tool that feedback it has learned and improved. He notes that his own skill and background as a writer has helped him become a better user of AI. Because generative AI operates on plain language prompts, specificity in the use of language is an incredibly useful skill. As he writes prompts, he asks himself how that set of words might be misinterpreted and how he can tighten up that prompt to ensure it produces the result he wants.
Developing that skillset, Warner explains, is essential to safeguarding some of the risks associated with generative AI, such as hallucination. Becoming overly reliant on these systems, too, can create critical points of failure or bottlenecks where AI stops being accretive to efficiency. Using AI to speed processes means, too, that certain skills like communication cannot be allowed to atrophy. On a fundamental level, Warner believes AI can help advisors do their job better, not do their job for them, and out of that distinction the rest of his approach flows.
“I hope that rather than accepting things at an existing level and using AI to delegate tasks away to play more golf, we should all be hoping to elevate what we’re doing for clients,” Warner says. “It can free some time on the research side of things so we can spend more time building relationships and building understanding with our clients. We should become better advisors because we’ve got more access to education, research, tools, and proficiency. We can hopefully translate those into excess value for our clients.”
