Can AI help deliver behavioural advice?

Advisors by Purpose Solutions is building AI tools for its Advisor Solutions platform. In a year when AI tool after AI tool has been rolled out — on search engines, online shopping platforms, and social media — the firm has begun exploring how different forms of artificial intelligence can help advisors deliver value for their clients.

Jeff Gans, CEO and managing partner of Advisors by Purpose Solutions, admits that his firm is in the early exploratory stage of AI implementation. In those first explorations, though, he has seen a wide array of AI applications for advisors. He explained how integrating an AI could expedite onboarding and other administrative parts of the practice, freeing up time. But, as AI has grown more sophisticated, he sees a potentially more sophisticated application for the technology: delivering behavioural advice.

“We see the opportunity to use AI to look at client data, analyse trends, and point out behaviours that indicate a client is feeling anxious or stressed,” Gans says. “Is the client logging into their portal twenty-five times in a day? Has their normal behaviour changed? Are they moving money in a way that could indicate a conversation is needed? That’s where we see the most interesting opportunities, and what we’ll explore in the coming months and years is that question of identifying patterns and behaviours.”

Gans believes that an AI tool can help advisors as they explore the art of behavioural advice. Anxiety is often a cause of ‘buy high sell low’ behaviour. A client might get caught up in FOMO at the top of the market, or convince themselves the market is crashing further when it’s already hit bottom. Sometimes, by the time they’re sitting down with their advisor they’ve already convinced themselves to buy or sell.

An AI tool like the one Gans is envisioning could alert an advisor when their client begins to exhibit anxious behaviour. That would give an advisor the opportunity to be proactive, reach out, and talk their client down before they make a rash decision.

Gans says his team is not trying to build a tool that knows clients better than their advisors do. Rather, he’s aiming to support what advisors already do, by allowing them to anticipate their clients better and organize priorities during a client call.

Gans admits that, when it comes to something as complex as behavioural advice, his team is about 20% of the way to a complete picture of what they could do. In working out the other 80% he expects they’ll learn a great deal more about what can, and can’t, be done by an AI tool. Fundamentally, though, their goal is to support advisors and anticipate client behaviour.

While that more sophisticated tool gets workshopped by the Advisors by Purpose Solutions development team, they’re rolling out more ‘meat and potatoes’ AI applications that Gans believes can also help advisors drive value.

Perhaps the simplest application Purpose is exploring is in onboarding. AI tools can ensure correctness in forms, documents, and materials clients need to complete during what can be a long and difficult onboarding process. Often that process involves a great deal of administrative back and forth, and simplifying the process can free up a great deal of time for advisors to focus on clients. Gans sees potential on the portfolio management and analysis side, too, using an AI to provide an objective eye and context for a client’s current asset allocation.

Advisors by Purpose Solutions is building their AI tools in house, while partnering with Conquest Planning on the planning side and d1g1t on the portfolio management side. Gans and his team are watching other firms, too, and seeing what applications for AI they’re finding that can inform their own development process. His team plans to integrate these tools within the existing Advisor Solutions platform.

While AI has been a hot topic this year, it’s been challenging at times to separate the hype from the value. Gans is aware of that, and insists his team isn’t building an ‘AI for AI’s sake.’ He says his team isn’t just looking for ways to slap an AI label on their platform, rather they’re asking where they can actually deliver that will help advisors.

“We're not creating an AI robot that's going to call your clients for you,” Gans says. “What we are doing is saying, ‘how do we embed intelligence into the processes and tools that you use every day, so that your process can be better, can be more efficient, can give you more scale and capacity to grow and more scale and capacity to spend time with your clients and get into the deep behavioural insights?’ We believe that the more time an advisor is spending with their clients, the more they’re helping those clients meet their goals and make the right decisions.”