Mark Butler starts the week by reaching out to an advisor who just finished a client meeting 10 minutes ago.
Butler watched his adviser collect and organize the notes he took with a pen and pad. He hurriedly typed into the computer. And pasted those notes into Butler’s new pilot program for his AI-powered ideas.
In a fraction of a second, those notes turned into follow-up correspondence that summarized the most important parts of the meeting with the client and suggested some key action items. After a few edits, the advisor had a completed follow-up letter to the client, ready to move on to something else on her jam-packed to-do list.
that’s the vision Wealth Management GPTis an advisor-only writing tool powered by OpenAI technology.
Founded by Butler, former president and CEO of Skience, a financial services software and consulting provider based in Herndon, Virginia, the tool is one of many new ideas. Born out of this year’s AI boom.
In a LinkedIn post published the same day At the Wealth Management GPT launch at the end of June, Butler said curiosity about the technology had blossomed into an obsession with how advisors could use AI to run their businesses more efficiently.
read more: Will giving clients access to the ChatGPT tool allow more clients to access Advisor?
“In general, I think ChatGPT alone has real value. Like all of us, I was just curious and had a lot of time to play with it over the winter,” Butler said in an interview.
After his own testing, Butler started talking to his advisors and coming up with ideas such as: How large language models can be tailored for the wealth management industry. He also spent time researching how other industries are looking to leverage this technology.
“And I thought, how do you take a picture? [new] What kind of technology is really easy for advisors to use? So they have no training. “There are only basic instructions…can it be that easy?” Butler said. “That was the premise.”
During the spring, Butler developed the Wealth Management GPT Pilot with a group of engineers. With the goal of communicating with the client, the team started with one of his scenarios and eventually built nine of his other templates to complete the pilot offering.
Wealth Management GPT
Butler said about 100 people were involved with the pilot as of mid-July. Key features of the tool include templates created specifically for wealth managers, personalized client communications, intelligent content suggestions, and a simple design that even advisors who do not consider themselves technical experts can operate.
Butler met with financial planning this week to discuss new business goals and explain why human expertise is key to building AI that has real impact.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Financial plan: There are 100 people involved in the development of Wealth Management GPT. Is it for advisors only? Or do you work with other experts as well?
Mark Butler: It’s a fairly broad group. To be honest, we started out focusing on advisors. And what I learned quickly, probably a month or so after I did the press release, was that marketers from all walks of life were interested in using this. So people who are creating content for advisors, or for the industry at large, are very attracted to this and are using it. So we’ve got about 60 advisors and about 40 more staff, a lot of them in the marketing space. We have several journalists who are using it and are interested. Anyone interested can join as long as they don’t think they’re trying to steal my trade secrets. Pilot is free. No obligation. He wants about 1,000 people to join the pilot for a few months. Then you can actually publish. And since ChatGPT really requires you to know where you’re going, I find a structured format very useful. It also allows you to work with prompts.
FP: You’ve talked many times about how your natural curiosity about technology pushed you forward in the early stages of development. How long ago have you been testing ChatGPT and realizing its potential as a business tool?
MB: pretty quickly. And it turns out there are some things it can’t do. It wasn’t very good, or rather, I don’t think I’m good at studying people. Like facts about people. Maybe it’s gotten better in the last few months.but for [researching] I myself was completely wrong. So I quickly realized that it didn’t work very well. But if you think about other things or asset management use cases, you’ll think about doing performance calculations. You think about the calculations behind your financial planning solution. All of these can be done with ChatGPT. even analysis. There are several people doing detailed analysis such as pattern recognition and trends. He has to hire ten people to code. So I think the direction we want to go at some point is in other areas of financial services. Accounting, banking, insurance, real estate. There are versions of the Wealth Management GPT for all of these industries.
FP: There are a plethora of AI tools on the market today. How do you stand out in such a crowded crowd?
MB: Advisors are very intrigued by this, but the depth of the conspiracy is kind of superficial. For example, they may have used ChatGPT and messed with it a bit. But that’s where the line gets drawn when other solutions do more. Many advisors don’t go there unless it’s very easy to use. Our goal was to require no training. All but two of the pilots got up and started running on their own without any instructions. I think that’s the big difference.And look, I’m totally fine [it] If anything exceeds the Wealth Management GPT within 6 months. Things are going really fast. that’s ok. This is fun. It’s mostly experimental. It has real-world use cases and real value, and we’re proving it. But at the same time, something can happen that turns this upside down.it’s part of the evolution of many of these things
FP: What kind of advisor would you like to work with on this solution?
MB: I figured this would be useful for any advisor, so I was called to speak on the subject from every market segment, from large news agencies to the smallest RIAs. What all advisors have in common is the desire to communicate effectively with their clients. Some of them want to be creators. They want to make blogging easy. Many of them don’t know how to do that. They want to be able to organize meetings with their customers. They want to educate their customers. Many of the use cases we provide are very applicable, whether it’s a million dollar producer or he’s a $50,000 producer. It really doesn’t matter. Therefore, there is no target market. I believe all advisors are out there, regardless of whether you are independent, work in a bank branch, or are part of the Wirehouse.
