Actionable AI Strategies for Today’s Financial Advisor
- Jay Coulter, CFP®, CIMA®
- Oct 5
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 8
Scale Your Practice and Strengthen Client Connections with AI Strategies for Financial Success: Actionable AI Strategies for Today’s Financial Advisor
Imagine scaling your advisory practice, reducing your workload, and deepening client relationships—all without hiring another team member. It’s not a fantasy; it’s what today’s top advisors are achieving by leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
Duncan MacPherson, CEO of Paro Systems and a leading voice in practice management, has laid out a powerful blueprint detailing Actionable AI strategies that financial professionals can implement immediately to improve efficiency and productivity.
This is from an interview on the Resilient Advisor Podcast earlier this year with Jay Coulter.
AI Adoption is Non-Negotiable
For financial advisors today, AI adoption is no longer optional. This shift is driven by three primary factors: fiduciary responsibility, the immense business opportunity, and the personal impact on your life.
Professionally, the necessity of AI boils down to consistency and time. Every advisor has 24 hours in a day, and you must decide how you spend them. Are you "putting sand in a shopping cart"—transacting work that leads nowhere—or are you "putting sand in the hourglass" giving yourself the gift of time and efficiency that will compound very quickly?
By adopting AI, you demonstrate to your clients that you are innovative, a serious student of technology, and constantly striving to achieve the professional contrast necessary to differentiate yourself from the pack.
An Enabler, Not a Threat
There is a common misconception that AI is designed to replace the financial advisor. On the contrary, AI is intended to be a complementary tool—an enabler, not a threat. The goal is liberation.
Advisors who resist innovation risk being on a collision course with obsolescence or a plateau. Those who are "climbing" keep innovating, refining, and optimizing what they do. AI is designed to supplement and liberate you to focus on what is truly yours: the proprietary elements of your practice.
AI will not fully possess Emotional Intelligence (EI), and this is the space where advisors must go deeper. As tasks become more commoditized, AI frees you up to focus on the things that make you feeworthy and referable, allowing you to address unmet needs and become indispensable.
The Role, Goal, Soul Prompting Framework
To ensure that you receive meaningful results from AI tools (like ChatGPT or Grok), you must start with effective prompting. Applying the following framework helps define your request and humanize the output:
Role: Tell AI who you are and who your addressable audience is. (Example: "I am a financial professional who wants to work more closely with business owners approaching a liquidity event.")
Goal: Clearly define what you are trying to accomplish.
Soul: Instruct AI to humanize the response to ensure the output is authentic and relatable.
Using AI to Create Intellectual Property (IP)
Advisors manage money, people, and the business itself. While managing money is a minimum requirement, the business and client management processes are proprietary.
For fee-for-service, knowledge-for-profit professionals, the essential mindset is to go "from vapor to paper." If critical business knowledge lives only in your head or a team member’s head, it’s a skill. If it’s documented, organized, professionalized, and standardized, it becomes valuable intellectual property (IP) that drives the value of your business.
AI can dramatically accelerate the creation of this IP:
Professionalize Your Structure: Ask AI to create an organizational chart with roles and responsibilities for your team, or to build a framework for a procedures manual and playbook.
Document Your Processes: Define every step in your processes. For example, how many steps are in your "fit process"—the steps taken from the moment of an introduction to the first meeting with a prospective client? Or document your onboarding process to fast-track new clients to advocate status.
In the past, documenting these processes was a massive mental lift. Now, AI can get you 90% down the track in three seconds, enabling the compounding effect of incrementalism. You could have your entire client experience organized in under 90 days.
Supercharging Your CRM and Client Engagement
Relationship management, hand-in-glove with practice management, is key to success. Every interaction with a client—online, on the phone, or in person—must be invested into the rest of the relationship.
When everything is documented in your CRM, your clients will feel and notice that you don't just care about them in general; you care specifically about what they care about.
Consider using the FORM framework (Family, Occupation, Recreational interests, and Money) to guide comprehensive "Know Your Client" conversations. Tools exist, such as Jump, that act as a "sidecar" to your CRM, bolstering it by capturing everything the client shares—their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and setbacks—and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
This level of detail means you are always prepared, you get in front of Money in Motion, you become competitor-proof, and you earn the right to be referable. Your clients don't need to know everything you know; they just need to know that you know, and that is as much a feeling as it is a quantifiable deliverable.
Looking Ahead
In the next five years, every business must be viewed as being built to be sold. Even if you have no immediate exit strategy, investing effort into working on your business contributes to its worth. The goal is to depersonalize the business, so clients trust the practice and the process, as well as the people.
AI enables this depersonalization, allowing you to sustain your practice, expand your thinking, and ensure the business serves your life, not the other way around. By finding the sweet spot where AI and EI balance, you establish the primary driver of your value proposition and position yourself for unprecedented growth.
Download the Whitepaper from Pareto Systems
At Titleist, our TAM360 platform enables advisors to use an AI enabled, digital first, tightly integrated platform to serve their clients. Jump is just one of the tools that are part of our package.
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