As offering financial advice becomes more complex and client-centric, financial advisors need to adopt new technologies to meet their clients’ evolving needs as well as managing to keep up with their workload. One of these revolutionary technologies is artificial intelligence, or AI. And a prime example of AI that you may have experimented with already is the chatbot, ChatGPT, developed by research lab OpenAI.
More and more programs are being built to include a chatbot component that will be able to analyze financial data accurately, summarize and send client meeting notes and create financial reports and forecasts.
We’ve been testing multiple chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and FinChat (ChatGPT for investors), as well as other AI programs that can help with summarizing, grammar and spell-checking and transcription. We have had varying levels of success with them.
AI may offer opportunities to enhance service delivery, but it also has certain limitations that should be noted. In the following article, we will address the very important topic of the limitations of this technology. Today, though, we present four areas where we are starting to use ChatGPT right now at Taylor Financial Group (TFG).
1. Educating team and clients
ChatGPT can play an instrumental role in generating educational content tailored to your clients’ needs. It can explain complex financial terms in comprehensible language, create detailed articles on investment strategies, and even design interactive quizzes. Having this kind of educational content can empower your clients, helping them make better-informed decisions and strengthening their relationship with your firm.
You could include a chatbot on your website to act as a 24/7 “concierge” that can answer any firm or general financial FAQ’s—and collect client information to generate leads you can follow up with.
Practice pointer: We’ve recently hired a few new members to the TFG team, one of whom did not have a finance background. She has asked ChatGPT to explain certain terminology, thus getting familiar with the language of the industry and learning some key concepts she needed to perform her new duties within the company. It can do the same for a client who has general questions about finance and who might need extra help understanding full concepts.
2. Streamlining administrative tasks
Paperwork and administrative tasks, while vital, can be time-consuming. However, with the assistance of ChatGPT, financial advisors can automate several of these tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical aspects of their work. Another platform that has been particularly helpful in this regard is Otter.ai.
Otter.ai is a powerful tool that we have utilized to record and transcribe internal meetings, recap key points and capture action items. By leveraging this platform, we have been able to streamline our administrative processes and improve overall efficiency within our financial advisory firm.
ChatGPT also offers valuable automation capabilities. For example, an advisor can instruct ChatGPT to create a follow-up email after a client meeting, summarizing the points discussed. This application not only saves time but also ensures that crucial information is accurately conveyed to the client. By integrating AI tools like ChatGPT and Otter.ai into our workflow, we have witnessed a significant increase in operational efficiency and client satisfaction.
Practice pointer: We’ve experienced great success in using ChatGPT to streamline administrative tasks. An excellent example of this success is our use of AI to generate drafts of emails to leads and establish internal processes for follow-up.
We requested ChatGPT to generate three follow-up emails for a cold lead and create a process for when to send those emails out. With minimal editing, we swiftly tailored the drafts to our specific requirements and seamlessly implemented the follow-up process into our workflow. This integration has not only saved us time but has also contributed to the overall effectiveness of our efforts to nurture leads.
3. Creating social media and marketing content
ChatGPT can be used to assist in creating content for your firm. Given the correct prompt, ChatGPT can write blog posts, create scripts for videos, create email campaigns, and generate copy for social media posts (see Figure 1). ChatGPT will also come up with ideas based on a prompt, which you can then expand on in your creative process.
Figure 1: ChatGPT Generates a Twitter Post
Source: Taylor Financial Group
Practice pointer: ChatGPT has been very helpful in the content creation aspect of our workflow. We’ve got a high turnover of content with our weekly, monthly, and quarterly newsletters, announcements and social media. It’s been very effective in cutting down on the time needed to work on these marketing items, freeing up more of our time for internal tasks.
Given the correct parameters, ChatGPT can even write complete articles and social media posts, including relevant hashtags. We’re also using it for script writing, as we start incorporating video content at our practice. See below for a screen shot of a script we may use as a basis for answering a relatively simple client question about the widow penalty.
Figure 2: ChatGPT Generates a Script to Be Used in a Video
Source: Taylor Financial Group
4. Editing articles and providing summaries
ChatGPT is very good at summarizing articles, though the quality of the summary varies with the complexity and length of the article. It does well with summarizing articles of moderate length, and its understanding is typically quite good. If the article is exceedingly long or complex, it might be necessary to ask the AI to summarize it in chunks. We have also asked ChatGPT to edit ghost-written articles that are provided to us.
On the other hand, when we had asked ChatGPT to summarize an interview on tax planning that I had given, the results were interesting. The summary was clearly written but very sanitized. During the interview, I had provided case studies and anecdotal evidence. I also criticized certain practice approaches and provided novel approaches to standard tax planning techniques. The ChatGPT summary omitted all of these more novel and non-verifiable discussion points.
I found that very disconcerting, as our summary was not really a summary. It was a dumbed-down and overly basic overview that actually missed some of the more salient, if controversial, points.
Something else to consider: initially, you could use ChatGPT to summarize articles, videos from YouTube, and webinars that contained a transcript via a link. The feature quietly disappeared from both Open AI and Bard, although it’s still possible to get summaries of articles by simply copying and pasting the text into the platform.
We’ve gotten three-page summaries from a 67-page article by doing this. While it can no longer process summaries through a link, that may be a feature that makes a return in the future.
Practice pointer: At TFG, we’ve been using this feature quite a bit. The summaries of articles aren’t always perfect, but they’re a good starting point. We still have to read through the content and double check that the summary is correct or add in more detailed information that sometimes gets lost in translation. But for the purposes of creating a quick summary for a write-up, ChatGPT does an excellent job.
For example, we asked ChatGPT to summarize a Michael Kitces article, which is typically 5,000–10,000 words. We received back a very nice summary that was about 1,000 words in length, without the charts and the graphics from the original article. It did a nice job of editing the article and can change the text to be for a different audience, i.e., reposition an industry article to be for clients.
The integration of AI into your practice can empower financial advisors in several ways already, and we see only room to expand from here on out. By embracing this technology, advisors can save time and create efficiencies. Despite its limitations—which, again, we will discuss in an upcoming article—right now ChatGPT serves as a valuable resource for creating quick blog posts or other communications, providing summaries of articles, and streamlining workflow processes.