AI for Advisors newsletter
You’re using artificial intelligence—maybe every day, maybe so naturally by now that it’s woven into how you prep for meetings, draft follow-up emails, and think through a client’s situation. It’s working for you.
Now look around the office. Your associate tried ChatGPT once and never went back. Your paraplanner calls it “interesting” but hasn’t found a single practical use. Your ops person heard it makes mistakes and decided the safest move was to wait—indefinitely, if possible.
This is the pattern I see often. The advisor is all in. The team is not. And nobody is quite sure what to do about that gap.
What many advisors assume
When adoption stalls, most advisors reach for the obvious explanation: the team needs more training, or they just haven’t spent enough time with it yet. But if that were the whole story, you’d show them a few prompts, they’d see the value, and everyone would be off and running.
That’s not what happens. You show them, they nod, and nothing changes. Or they try it, hit a rough output, and quietly stop.
What’s going on
When I look at firms where team adoption has stalled, I see the same three things:
- Unclear use cases. Most people don’t resist AI because they’re afraid of technology. They resist it because they don’t see how it helps them, specifically, with the work they’re already doing. “I don’t see how this applies to me” is not irrational. It’s honest.
- Workflow disruption. Even when someone sees the potential, the first experience with AI often feels slower, not faster. You have to stop what you’re doing, figure out what to type, evaluate the output, and decide whether it’s usable. For someone who already has a system that works, the switching cost feels high.
- The question nobody asks out loud. “What does this mean for my role?” People worry about being replaced, or about becoming less valuable, or about the ground shifting under them. They don’t say this in meetings. But it shapes how they engage with the tool.
These are real people making reasonable calculations based on what they can see.
What changes when it starts to work
I’ve watched this shift happen in enough firms to see the pattern:
Structure reduces hesitation. When you give someone a simple prompting framework—something like RTF-CQE: Role, Task, Format, then refine with Context, Questions, and Examples—they stop staring at the blank text box. A framework tells you how to get started, and that alone removes the biggest barrier.
One workflow unlocks belief. The first time someone uses AI to prep for a client meeting in half the time, or drafts a follow-up email that sounds like them, or pulls together a first draft of a marketing piece in 10 minutes, something shifts. They stop thinking of AI as a novelty and start thinking of it as a tool. One specific, repeatable workflow is worth more than a dozen demos.
Time saved creates momentum. Once someone saves real time and actual minutes they can feel, the conversation changes. They start looking for the next thing to try. No one has to convince them anymore.
Show, don’t tell
Here’s the part most advisors don’t want to hear. If you’re leading a team, your job is not to tell people to use AI. Your job is to show them—and to keep showing them.
That means using it in front of your team during the normal course of work. Not in a formal training session, but something more like pulling up a prompt during a team meeting, showing the output, and talking through how you got there.
For example: “I used ChatGPT (or Copilot or Claude) to draft this. Here’s the prompt I used, here’s what it gave me, and here’s what I changed.”
When sharing what you produce with AI becomes a normal part of how your team works, the message lands without needing to be a mandate.
Consistency matters more than intensity. A weekly five-minute demo beats a quarterly workshop every time.
Build it into the daily workflow
Most teams treat AI as something to experiment with when they have a spare moment, which means it still sits outside the real work. Stronger teams treat AI as a component of how work gets done.
The difference changes everything. A meeting prep workflow means every client meeting starts with an AI-generated brief. A follow-up workflow means every post-meeting email gets a first draft from AI before a human refines it. A marketing workflow means content production has a predictable cadence because no one is starting from zero.
You don’t need all three. Pick one that is closest to something your team already does and build from there.
Where adoption breaks down
When team adoption stalls, the reasons are usually structural. Three patterns come up most often:
Too many use cases at once. Someone presents 15 things AI can do, and the team walks away impressed but paralyzed, with no clear starting point. When people aren’t sure which task to try first, they don’t try any.
Leadership doesn’t visibly use it. Teams notice when the advisor talks about AI but never uses it in front of them. They always notice.
Demos don’t connect to real work. The prompts are borrowed from the Internet, the examples are generic, and nothing maps to the actual tasks sitting on someone’s desk that afternoon.
These are patterns, and patterns can be changed.
A practical way to start
If your team’s adoption is uneven, here’s a simple way to close the gap:
Choose one workflow. Pick the task that’s most repetitive, most time-consuming, or most obviously suited to AI. Meeting prep is a good default. Here’s a prompt you could use tomorrow:
Role: You are a financial planning assistant helping me prepare for a client review meeting. Context: The client is [first name], a [brief description—e.g., “retired couple, mid-70s, drawing from a mix of IRA and taxable accounts”]. Task: Based on the attached notes from our last meeting, draft a one-page meeting brief that includes: Format: key topics to revisit, any open action items, recent portfolio or planning changes to acknowledge, and two or three questions I should raise. Tone: Keep the tone conversational—this is for my eyes, not the client’s. Questions: Ask me questions, one at a time, so we get the best one-page meeting brief.
That prompt works because it’s specific, repeatable, and tied to something your team already does every week. Swap in a new client’s first name and it runs again.
Demonstrate it yourself. Do it live, with your team watching. Show the prompt, answer the questions, show the output, show what you kept and what you changed.
Let one or two people try it. Not the whole team at once. Start with someone who’s curious and let them use it on a real task.
Share the results. When it works, make it visible. “Here’s what happened when Sarah used it for the Johnson meeting.”
Repeat. Do it again next week, and the week after that. Each round makes the next one easier—because adoption compounds once people see it working.