USE OF TECHNOLOGY 5 ways advisors are actually using and benefiting from AI

You’ve read all kinds of articles about what AI can do or how it might be able to help you … theoretically.

But how are financial advisors and RIAs like you actually using and benefiting from AI in their practices?

Successful application of AI depends on tuning out the hype and staying focused on solving real-world problems for clients and your business. Our research indicates there are five key areas where advisors are using AI tools to solve problems in their practices.

(The examples of companies and applications we provide are for illustrative and educational purposes only. Their features, business models and names are also subject to change, given how quickly the AI landscape evolves. Financial professionals should follow firm policies and procedures. Please see important information at the end of this article.)

1. Client meetings

“Every advisor knows the question, ‘Hey, did you get the notes in?’” says Michael Franklin, cofounder of Tandem Financial in Colorado. It takes time to prep for a meeting and create an agenda, enter notes from the meeting into your CRM (customer relationship management) tool, assign action items to team members and update the client’s information on record in the CRM.

That’s why Franklin and many other advisors have turned to AI notetakers. They can handle all those tasks and more. Some AI notetakers also draft client emails before and after the meeting, offer data and analytics about your meeting (e.g., which people talked for how long) or have chatbots that let you get information about a client by asking a question (e.g., “Did we talk about insurance during the meeting?” or “Does this client have pets?”).

A 2024 survey from The Kitces Report showed some of the most widely used AI notetakers among advisors.

Which tool you use will likely depend on your practice. Many of the meeting platforms that advisors use, like Teams and Zoom, now have integrated AI notetakers. Some firms have created in-house versions. Morgan Stanley, for instance, released AI @ Morgan Stanley Debrief in June 2024. Others have formed partnerships. In November 2024, LPL announced a partnership with Jump.

Because some of the value of AI notetakers is tied to their ability to pull from CRM data for meeting prep and update CRM data after the meeting, it’s noteworthy when CRM providers partner with AI notetakers or even build their own. For example, Wealthbox announced a partnership with FinMate in May 2024, then recently announced that it will roll out its own AI notetaker in Summer 2025.

AI notetakers can have their downsides. As Franklin points out, part of taking notes is identifying what’s important in a client meeting. Removing these tasks may put junior advisors at risk of not developing critical skills. “Those muscles can get weak,” he says.

Be careful about when you start recording conversations, too. Michael Kolb, a founder and portfolio manager at Evergreen Wealth Solutions in Pennsylvania, uses Zoom AI Companion for internal meetings. “We don't use the feature until we are ready to go on the record. This helps avoid inadvertently capturing off-topic conversations. It also ensures that everyone on the call is aware that the service is being used.”

And AI notetakers still need human editors. “It’s generally accurate,” Kolb says, but even for internal meetings, “we have learned you never distribute AI content directly.”

So AI can help you draft emails after client meetings. What about the rest of your client emails?

2. Client emails

AI can help you manage emails much more quickly than you do on your own. “I can actually get through all my emails before going home for the day and not have to work on email at home,”  says Franklin. AI can also come up with ideas you didn’t think of on your own. For Franklin, it suggested an ETF in a draft email to a client. He looked into it and agreed it was a good investment idea.

There are two ways to enlist AI’s help with emails. You can ask the AI draft the email for you, or you can write the email yourself and ask AI help you refine. Both of these methods require creating “prompts,” which are the instructions you provide as input for an AI tool to get your desired output.

Kolb uses non-email applications like Grammarly and ChatGPT to help him with emails. But some email providers have built-in AI features. For instance, Microsoft offers it in Outlook through Copilot, and Google offers it in Gmail through Gemini. These built-in features allow you to use prompts to specify the tone and length of the email (short and direct, long and formal, etc.), describe what you want the email to say and ask the AI for revisions.

Other AI-enabled email apps remove the need for prompting altogether. They automatically create draft replies to emails that you receive. Franklin uses one such app, Vega Minds, which is built specifically for financial advisors. Vega Minds and other apps like it will identify when you’ve received an email from a client and automatically create a draft reply. When you open the thread in your inbox, you can see and edit the draft.

Because you have your unique way of talking — and likely talk differently with different clients — these apps “learn” your writing style with a given client over time. Behind the scenes, the app is feeding the client email you just received to the AI along with all previous exchanges with that client as context. It is then prompting the AI to draft a response to that client email with the context in mind.

Drafting emails is just one example of creating content. Gen AI tools are built for content generation, which is the basis of many marketing efforts.

3. Marketing

Advisors are using AI to create content much more quickly than they can on their own. Kolb, for instance, uses ChatGPT to create outlines for quarterly presentations that he delivers to a local medical society. You can also use chat models like ChatGPT to generate blog posts and articles, social media posts, copy for your ads and website, bios and much more.

If you’re using AI chat models in this way, it’s important to know how to create a good prompt. A good prompt contains clear, concise instructions and important context. Depending on the specific AI tool you’re using, you might also provide examples or break complex tasks into steps.

You can use prompts to inform your marketing strategy, not just to create marketing assets. For insance, an advisor using OpenAI’s Deep Research feature might use a prompt like this to do market research and identify a niche:

I am a financial advisor in the Chicagoland area. I work on a three-person team and we currently serve HNW individuals and families with a strong focus on retirement and comprehensive financial planning. We are looking for organic sources of growth and need help analyzing the market to understand who we should target.

Can you help me build a comprehensive research report with an analysis on who my team should target? Look at geographic and generational data. What trends can I take advantage of to grow my business? What might be underserved segments that are HNW but may not be a focus of competitors? Identify their top financial concerns, the digital channels they most frequently use, and common topics that resonate with them (e.g., legacy planning, real estate investments, philanthropic giving, etc.). Include any notable behavioral or demographic insights.

Be as specific and detailed as possible. Look to use research and unique and credible data sources.

Beyond AI chat models, there are also apps that help users use AI to create content without knowing how to create prompts. Many of these are generic and not specific to advisors. They include Jasper, Blaze.ai, Rytr, Writesonic and Copy.ai. They allow you to select from a wide range of marketing assets.

Advisor-specific marketing software providers have also been adding AI features. FMG Suite, for instance, announced an AI-powered “one-click” social media caption creator in March 2023.

AI is good at quickly generating large amounts of content. On the other side of the same coin, AI is also good at digesting large amounts of content, and that can benefit advisors.

4. Large document analysis

Think of how often you need to read and analyze large documents. Advisors are using AI to help. Kolb points out that Adobe offers users “AI Assistant,” which can summarize large PDFs and spot differences between two PDFs.

There are also apps built specifically for financial professionals. These include FP Alpha, Holistiplan, Vanilla and Wealth.com. Historically, many of these companies have focused on and branded themselves in one of three areas: tax, insurance and estate planning. All three involve large documents such as tax returns, insurance policies, wills, trusts and POAs (power of attorney). But because the underlying function is the same — analyze a large document — more of these companies are trying to offer one-stop solutions.

Kolb and Michael Schmid, a senior financial planner with Capital Group’s Private Client Services group, have both used tools in this category. They both say AI’s ability to quickly read and analyze large documents is a big time-saver. It can extract text from a document, then provide recommendations based on the data.

It’s worth noting that the technology powering these apps isn’t always AI. Text extraction, for instance, is usually done by optical character recognition (OCR), which predates AI. The recommendations that some apps provide are generated by rules-based systems, not AI; if the app reads something in the document, it offers the corresponding recommendation.

This highlights the importance of starting with a problem and finding the solution, not the other way around. As Schmid puts it, “The important thing isn’t what AI can do. It’s all about what we do for clients, then how tech helps us do that. Whether it’s AI or something else.”

As always, keeping a human editor in the loop is critical. Schmid recalls an instance of an app recommending that a client who works as a freelance writer form a C corp, which he felt didn’t make sense for that individual.

Kolb observes another downside with these tools. “I think that AI struggles analyzing your qualitative datapoints,” he says. “How do you analyze a management team as AI, and more importantly, how do you analyze it from the perspective that you want?”

Out of the three areas that document extraction tools focus on, tax planning has historically been the most crowded with software providers and offered the most opportunities for advisors to use AI.

5. Head start on tax planning

The most valuable thing AI has added to tax planning software is enabling scenario analysis, according to Schmid. “Before, one thing that was impossible was modeling out all the different strategies for exercising options with future tax savings in mind.”

Many of the tools that offer document extraction for tax returns also offer scenario analysis. FP Alpha and Holistiplan are two examples. They allow advisors to map out and see the potential tax implications in different scenarios related to equity compensation, Roth conversions, depreciation recapture, capital gains and more.

With equity compensation scenario analysis, for instance, you can explore different strategies for handling RSUs, NQSOs, ISOs and ESPPs. 

While advisors typically aren’t offering direct tax advice like CPAs do, Schmid says AI enables him to be a better, more well-informed partner to the CPAs who are working with his clients. “We can start the conversation at a more advanced stage.”

Given how quickly AI is developing as a technology and how many companies are forming around its uses, the list of AI-powered tools that advisors have at their disposal will continue to grow and evolve. That’s why it helps to always start with the fundamentals. Is there a business need? Does this tool actually save time? Is it best-in-class?

By focusing on the fundamentals and the needs of clients, advisors are more likely to see if and how they should adopt AI.