If you were both a financial advisor and an AI fintech founder, how would your dual perspective shape the ways you use AI in your practice?

As the founder of Intrepid Wealth Partners and an advisor with 20 years of experience, Derek Notman, CFP®, ChFC has always understood the importance of personal relationships. He is a longtime believer in the idea that the advisor’s primary competitive advantage is deep connections with clients. “Human beings are wired to connect with other human beings,” he says.

Notman is also the founder of Couplr AI, a fintech that uses AI to match prospective clients with compatible advisors. His focus on AI doesn’t diminish his beliefs about the importance of human connections. In fact, it strengthens them. “AI should be used to enhance human connection, not to replace it,” he says.

With the importance of human connection as his guide, Notman details four ways to reframe your thinking about AI and highlights some considerations for using it in your practice. 

AI should deepen your relationships, not dilute them

“Does it deepen or dilute relationships?” That’s the first question Notman asks when evaluating an AI tool — or any tech tool, for that matter. “In other words, does this actually help you connect with clients better? Or does it simply turn them into another transaction?” he says.

Take AI notetakers, for example. To Notman, the point of the notetaker is to deepen the conversation you’re having with the client. “One of the struggles that I had as an advisor before notetakers is anytime I’m physically writing something down, it means I’m not looking at the client and I’m not fully listening to what they’re saying,” he recalls. “So now I get to focus entirely on the conversation.”

Then Notman’s question for advisors is, “What do you do with the notes after that?” In his view, “If you’re just plugging it in, letting it record and never using it again, then you’re actually getting lazier. And you’re doing yourself a disservice and your clients a disservice.”

Instead, Notman adds a manual step to force himself to remember important details from the conversation. “Get the whole audio transcript and now put that into ChatGPT. ‘Hey, will you summarize this conversation? What’s most important to the client? What action items are there for me as an advisor? Tell me the top three personal things this client told me.’” Even though AI notetakers do some of these things automatically and instantly, Notman builds in time to reinforce important takeaways in his own mind.

“Remember that people are not going to buy your tech. They're going to buy the human connection your tech provides,” he says.

AI should amplify your voice, not replace it

AI can worsen the homogenization problem: to clients and prospects, every advisor sounds like every other advisor. If all advisors rely on the same methods, using the same AI tools that are trained on the same data, they can easily start to sound the same.

This is why it’s vitally important to be authentic, says Notman. Authenticity starts with being extremely clear about your niche, ideal client and value proposition. “The advisor should first figure out, ‘Who is my ideal client? What’s that persona? What’s our brand? What’s our mission, what’s our vision?’ You have to crystallize those things first.” Find your voice before you let AI amplify it.

Notman applies this to his firm’s newsletter. He drafts it himself instead of letting AI draft it. “We do a monthly newsletter to all of our clients. I contribute to half of it, and then the other advisor contributes to half of it. So it's both of our perspectives. And so we write the whole thing out by ourselves. It's our voice, it's our thoughts, but then you can use AI to clean it up.”

AI just amplifies what’s already there, so the key is to make sure that what’s there is authentic and accurate. “Put good in, get good out. The AI output you get, no matter what you’re doing, is only as good as the input you give it,” Notman says.

AI should simplify your life, not complicate it

There are countless new, powerful AI applications constantly being added to the market. It would be impossible to try and look at all of them. “I try to tell advisors … have a smaller tech stack,” Notman says. “They only have so much time in the day. Most advisors don't want to be a technologist, but they want to use tech to make their life easier.”

It helps to choose the kinds of tools that you don’t even realize are there. The best tools are those that “disappear into the ether,” as Notman puts it. “It's there operating, but [advisors are] barely thinking about it and it's making their life easier in the process.”

He also recommends looking for tools that remove tasks without creating more of them. Notman’s guiding question when evaluating AI tools is, “Does it create or kill busy work? Is it helping you streamline things, whether it's scheduling or back office or filing in your CRM?”

AI should empower advisors, not scare them

According to Notman, the biggest barrier advisors face when it comes to adopting AI is psychological, not technical. “They’re a little bit afraid to use it,” he observes. “There’s some trepidation, like, ‘Is AI going to replace me?’”

Notman wants to reassure those advisors. “Skynet’s not taking over. AI’s not taking over.” He points to another technological wave that created some existential dread in the industry. “Some might recall the robo-advisor craze of 10, 12 years ago. ‘Oh, all advisors are going to be replaced by robo-advisors,’” he says.

But the fear can create an even more dangerous scenario. “If I don’t add AI as a tool, I am going to put myself at a disadvantage to all those that are using it,” he says.  

“Proof of concept is done. We know it works. And it’s only going to get better,” Notman says. “Don’t lag too long. Things are moving quicker. And at the end of the day, who do we answer to? We answer to the client. Clients are using all this stuff for everything else in their life. We should probably start trying to meet them where they’re at.”

This is true even for advisors who work at large firms and are confined to using only the tools provided for them. “I would learn it as quickly as possible. Whatever they do give you, go use it,” advises Notman. “Maybe your company’s got a version of ChatGPT that you can use internally. Start learning how to prompt.”

If you work for a large firm, you may even have an opportunity to become an important part of your leadership’s broader efforts to understand and implement AI across the company. As Notman points out, “What I have found is that most of these larger organizations, they do want feedback from the field. ‘Okay, this is great, but here are the limitations, here’s what I’d really like to do.’”

While you might never fully understand the inner workings of large language models or consider yourself a prompt engineer, you can use AI to your advantage by staying focused on the benefits it  can provide to you and your practice. You may even find it helps free up time to build deeper, more human client relationships.