One of our speakers at NextWealth Live said that the number of clients advisers work with at his firm increased from an average of 100 to 150 after implementing an AI solution to take notes and draft suitability reports.

100 to 150 – that is a HUGE leap from using a widely available AI tool.

I was lucky enough to be asked to share views on AI in wealth management at the recent Women in Platforms meet-up alongside Alasdair Walker and Felicia Meyerowitz-Singh. Alasdair is a financial planner and MD of Optimum Path, a chartered financial planning firm. He’s also my co-host on NextWealth’s AI Lab. Fee is co-counder of Engage Smarter AI, a firm that offers agentic AI solutions.

There remained scepticism among the attendees about the difference AI can actually make in business. I hear this a lot and it’s good to have a healthy dose of scepticism. The stat above is staggering. but will other firms enjoy these kinds of gains from adopting AI or was our speaker an outlier.

Last night, I attended the excellent Section School course Become an AI Leader in a Day. Greg Shove hosted and immediately won me over with his Never 51 hat. I’ve taken a number of Section School courses and they’ve all been excellent. Greg shared a chart early on in his presentation based on research Ethan Mollick has done to measure productivity gains by using AI. It’s pertinent here – his research provides clear evidence that individuals working with AI outperform individuals working alone “AI effectively replicated the performance benefits of having a human teammate. 

“Individuals working with AI performed just as well as teams without AI, showing a 0.37 standard deviation improvement over the baseline. This suggests that AI effectively replicated the performance benefits of having a human teammate – one person with AI could match what previously required two-person collaboration.”

AI can have a massive and positive impact on helping more people who need help and to improving efficiency in financial advice firms. But it won’t always go to plan. I’ve shared my AI fail (a terrible baking disaster) before. But the same goes in business – you won’t always get it right.

Another chart I snipped from last night’s Section School course shows the percentage of generative AI experiments firms do each year that they expect to scale in the next 3-6 months. Most are stuck in pilot.

It’s important to experiment and test and learn. It’s also important to have a champion for the programme that will lead the initiative in-house both from a project perspective but also change management.

Have you implemented AI in your firm? What have you found? And if you want to find out more about AI Lab where you can share live use cases and learnings with practitioners, let me know.

Heather