There has been a lot of talk lately of AI and Chat GPT, and how this new technology is going to be a game changer for the future financial advice - Yep, i put my hand up, i explored it myself….. 🙋‍♂️

A lot of the hype is just conceptual, and nobody has really been able to address any practical use of AI in advice. Particularly the biggest potential benefit - paraplanning.

So….. Why aren’t we using it?

The way i see it, there are 2 major reasons why we all aren’t using AI in our advice business:

1. Privacy - The advice industry deals in private personal information. Tools like ChatGPT are great, but i cant just copy and paste a clients personal information into any Large Language Model (LLM). It is a massive privacy risk.

2. Advice regulation is too complex - Over regulation of the advice industry has made it a complex box-ticking exercise. Your client can’t just ask a simple question and receive a simple answer. The adviser needs to jump through hoops and produce various long-winded documentation, regardless of the complexity of the advice.

For these reasons, there is a lack of tools available that can assist a paraplanner to produce an SOA.

Where To Next? …….

Microsoft have pre-released co-pilot for testing. Co-Pilot uses machine learning algorithms to understand the context of the task at hand and provide relevant suggestions. This technology can be adapted to the paraplanning process, helping paraplanners write SOAs more efficiently and accurately.

If you haven’t seen how it works in word documents, check it the video below:

When using co-pilot in your 365 apps, the data stays within your Microsoft environment, so you aren’t risking privacy breaching back to the LLM.

Will This Actually Help, Or Will It Be Another Useless Tool?

You are still going to need an SOA Wizard. Co-Pilot, as it stands, won't be able to write an SOA from scratch.

Don’t think you can just throw out your expensive advice CRM and start uploading documents to Microsoft word and co-pilot will write the SOA for you. You will still need an SOA Wizard and template to provide a document structure for the SOA and its various data inclusions.

Co-Pilot should be able provide suggestions and corrections based on the context of the SOA, ensuring that the document is accurate and comprehensive. It may also be able automate certain repetitive tasks, such as data entry and basic calculations, freeing up the paraplanner to focus on more complex aspects of the SOA.

Intiially, co-pilot will be a useful tool, but it won’t be life changing.

Could We Improve Co-Pilot’s Ability?

Let’s say you wanted Co-pilot to assist in writing SOA’s that are more consistent with previous SOA’s. This is where Microsoft Syntex and Azure OpenAI are two other AI technologies that can further enhance Co-Pilot's capabilities.

Microsoft Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to understand content, and making sense of unstructured data.

Think of it like this: Imagine you had hundreds of previous SOA’s stored in a folder, and when using co-pilot it was able to access the SOA’s as a reference point to assist in constructing the SOA.

With Syntex, it could be possible to use a word doc based template and upload the supporting files for Co-pilot to assemble the SOA from the various sources. I think could work for more basic advice scenarios, but for complex advice scenarios, you would probably still need a wizard to pull the data into the SOA from the various sources.

What About Post-QAR?

Going back to where we started - we aren’t using AI in our business because of privacy issues and complex advice regulation.

However, in the not too distant future, i can see a time where both of these issues won’t be holding us back.

• We can safely access AI in our Microsoft Apps using Co-pilot.

• Advice regulation will change post-QAR to make it easier to provide advice to clients.

What this ‘fit-for-purpose'‘ document looks like is still unknown, but it should be easier to produce the advice with the assistance of AI. Not to mention, the tech will only get better as we get to understand the new world of advice.