Positioning Your Practice Amid the Rise of AI

As AI technologies start to play a larger role in the industry, advisors who are able to form the strongest personal connections with clients may be the ones who come out on top.

In the coming years, wealthy clients who opt for a more traditional style of advice may expect it to be noticeably different from the AI-driven services that are quickly proliferating. If you’re looking to position your practice for these markets, these three aspects of the client experience matter most.

Client Discovery

This is your earliest and perhaps most important opportunity to form a deep connection with a client, as it allows you to demonstrate an attention to personal needs.

Artificial intelligence can analyze data and improve efficiency, but an experienced advisor can appreciate individual values and emotions. A discovery process that is centered around topics like values, ambitions, fears can help establish a core point of trust—that you’re looking out for each client as an individual person, not as a number in a system.

Annual Review

Each annual review is a retrospective on the year, but it’s also a kind of mini-discovery session. It’s an opportunity to check in and recalibrate—again focusing on the non-monetary drivers behind their wealth, like family life, passions and personal fulfillment.

While you leverage AI to process data and even perform certain wealth management functions, the updates you provide clients can prioritize things like life events and goals, net worth growth and legacy building, with market and investment performance as supporting components.

General Communications

Even the client communication you provide that is not one-to-one can help support and strengthen connections.

Clients want to know what’s happening in the markets and the economy, but they also need guidance on how to respond to it. Communications with insights on things like behavioural science, managing uncertainty and maintaining a well-reasoned perspective can help demonstrate a kind of value that cannot be artificially replicated.