We may be standing on the cusp of a tech revolution — is your firm poised to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI)?
If previous periods of disruption are any indication, there will be winners and losers in the AI transformation (a topic we explored in depth on Orion’s Weighing the Risks podcast). The firms that can leverage AI to improve efficiency and empower their workers to do higher-level, growth-focused work will be more likely to come out on top.
ChatGPT is one of the most potent generative AI tools available to the public today, and many are already discovering game-changing applications for the technology in their daily business activities. Financial advisors are no exception.
Let's look at some of the most promising use cases for ChatGPT for financial advisors and how you can encourage your team to use the tech creatively to fuel your growth.
An Important Note About ChatGPT
While ChatGPT is impressive, it’s important to note that it still has some limitations.
ChatGPT’s website reminds users that it may sometimes generate incorrect, harmful, or biased information or content. It’s crucial to double-check any output created by ChatGPT for accuracy and appropriateness.
ChatGPT also has limited knowledge of events that occurred after 2021. Natural language processing models, like ChatGPT, are trained on vast troves of data; ChatGPT was only trained on data from 2021 and earlier.
Use Cases: ChatGPT for Financial Advisors
With those limitations in mind, let’s turn to what ChatGPT can do to assist financial advisors in their daily work.
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1. Summarize Macroeconomic Trends
ChatGPT can synthesize reports and data, making it a helpful tool for summarizing the latest macroeconomic news.
Today’s clients expect proactive communication from their financial advisors — in fact, a recent survey from Vanguard-Spectrem found that slow outreach is a common reason investors would consider switching financial advisors.
Providing commentary on the latest macroeconomic news and how it impacts your clients’ portfolios is a way to shore up those valuable client relationships. But with so many headlines to follow, keeping up with the latest is time-consuming.
You can use ChatGPT to distill long-form economic news into more digestible takeaways. Review the summary created by AI, then infuse it with your commentary. This approach makes it easier for you to create more regular client touchpoints.
2. Draft Client Emails
According to data from McKinsey, the average worker spends 28 percent of their workweek reading and answering emails. Any tool that could help you shrink that number could prove a boon to your overall productivity.
ChatGPT can help you quickly draft emails to clients. Input the topic you’d like to cover as a prompt into ChatGPT, and the AI will provide a response you can review, revise, and send in less time than it might take to draft an email from scratch.
3. Begin Research Into Tools or Productivity Hacks
Because ChatGPT was trained on droves of data, it often has recommendations for tools or productivity hacks that can kick off your research on a given topic.
For example, if you’re looking for a new client relationship management (CRM) tool, you might ask ChatGPT to summarize the qualities a financial advisor should look for in a CRM. Then, you could ask it to provide a list of some of the top service providers for financial advisors.
This helps you begin your research in earnest with greater knowledge of the landscape and your needs.
4. Create Simplified Guidance for Clients
As someone with deep expertise in the financial space, it can be hard to put yourself in the shoes of a client who lacks your knowledge base.
Suppose a novice investor asks you to explain what a mutual fund is. You may struggle to give an answer that’s digestible for someone with limited investing knowledge.
ChatGPT can help you create a simplified write-up of complex topics. Ask the tool “How do I explain mutual funds to a novice investor,” and ChatGPT will provide a simple overview of the financial vehicle.
When you can provide information to clients that is clear and concise, you build trust and establish yourself as a go-to source for information.
5. Summarize Important Industry News
Just as important as keeping your clients informed about macro trends is maintaining your own knowledge about the goings-on in the financial industry.
Take the annual SEC Exam Priorities document as an example. Financial advisors benefit from knowing what compliance sticking points regulators have identified, but the annual report is dozens of pages long.
You can input sections of the report into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the key points. By having ChatGPT distill the report to high-level bullet points, you get a sense of the latest industry news without combing through the entire document yourself.
6. Create Job Descriptions
As your firm grows, you may wish to add new members to your team. Drafting job descriptions can be a tedious task, but ChatGPT can reduce the time invested in the initial process.
Provide ChatGPT with a bulleted list of basic qualifications and what the role entails, and ChatGPT can create a cohesive draft of the job description.
Using generative AI to speed up the drafting of key hiring documents allows you to invest more time in other aspects of the process, like screening candidates, conducting interviews, and checking references.
7. Draft Internal and Onboarding Documents
When you welcome these new team members to your firm, you’ll want to provide them with onboarding and training documents that set them up for success.
ChatGPT can take a first pass at drafting these documents. For example, you may want help creating an overview of your firm's vacation and sick day policies. You can input basic information about your policy into ChatGPT — the number of days you allow per year and how employees should notify their manager of time off — and the AI tool will create a cohesive document.
You may then review and edit the document as needed, saving you valuable time, which you can then invest in mentoring junior employees or engaging in professional development activities.
8. Generate Concepts for Marketing Campaigns
Many financial advisors struggle to find the time to market their business. Running a marketing department is a full-time job, and if your team is lean, you may not have an individual dedicated solely to marketing and advertising your firm.
ChatGPT can help your team generate basic marketing ideas to get you started. While you should not rely exclusively on ChatGPT to write your marketing copy — particularly with the SEC's new marketing rule, which demands greater compliance scrutiny of your marketing messaging — you can use ChatGPT in your brainstorming process.
Ask ChatGPT to generate a list of tactics your team can use to reach new prospects. Once you’ve decided on your approach, then you can create and refine messaging to meet your compliance standards.
9. Improve Your Prospecting Flow
When engaging with prospective clients, it’s very rarely a one-and-done conversation. Prospects are looking for a financial advisor who can assist them with major financial decisions and may take time to weigh their options.
Creating a series of emails you can send to prospects to stay top-of-mind and nurture the relationship can help position you as an attentive expert.
To begin the drafting process, you may turn to ChatGPT. Once you chart out the high-level plan for this email series, you can input the talking points for each email into ChatGPT and ask it to draft the email subject line and text.
From there, you can make adjustments as needed to create a cohesive email flow that keeps prospects engaged throughout their decision-making process.
10. Draft Client Review Documents
Establishing regular check-ins with your clients is essential to strengthening those relationships. But creating the outline for client reviews can be a time-consuming process.
ChatGPT can help you pull together your talking points. The AI tool can help you in advance of any client check-in calls by summarizing relevant documents and giving you a jumping-off point for your discussions.
After the meeting, you may also give ChatGPT a bulleted list of your discussion points and ask the tool to draft a summary of your conversation, which you can adjust and send in a follow-up email to your client.
As ChatGPT continues to evolve and improve, there will likely be even more ways in which financial advisors can harness the technology to streamline their workflows.
Continuing to experiment with the technology and finding new ways to make it work for you will be crucial in keeping pace with the changes AI may precipitate across the entire business ecosystem.
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