The Old Broker vs Artificial Intelligence

https://youtu.be/wht0TfoVnTY

In the late 1990s I was a rookie ‘Stock Broker’ working in an old fashioned bullpen at Dean Witter. On this particular day, there was a lot of excitement in the office. Byron Wein, the legendary Market Strategist was coming in to give a presentation at lunch. As all the brokers filed into the large conference room, with coats and ties on, the air was electric. Byron was a legend! 

The Branch Manager started the meeting by saying that we had one housekeeping item. Our branch had been selected to beta test an ‘Email’ system for client communication. There was a collective groan of disgust in the room of 120+ brokers. The manager then said…”I get your frustration. Hopefully this is just a fad.” 

Obviously it was not a fad.

At that time, as a young man, I was already emailing friends from my personal account and could see the benefits.

But, the ‘Old Brokers’ saw it as a nuisance. A fad to be left to us younger people.

I don’t have any data or recollection of how long it took the ‘Old Brokers’ to catch-up with the technology.

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, are you thinking like an ‘Old Broker?’

Recently my friend and client David Ortiz 👨🏽🍳 the Financial Chef, CFP®, RICP® had a featured guest post on Michael Kitces popular Kitces.com entitled “Designing “Custom GPTs” With Advanced ChatGPT Features To Enhance Advisor Capabilities With AI” (Link)

In the article he lays out how he leverages AI in his practice and even shares 4 Prompts.

• Prompt 1 – Discovery Meeting Overview

• Prompt 2 – Data Gathering For Meeting

• Prompt 3 – Review Meeting Summary

• Prompt 4 – Compliance

If you are not interested in learning what Prompts are, I can assure you that your competition is learning and starting to use them. You are not going to lose your clients to AI, you are going to lose your clients to advisors who are leveraging AI...someday.

It is like the 'Old Brokers' who did not want to use email.

David concludes his article by saying:

“Client satisfaction has soared as we've been able to deliver swifter, more thorough solutions. For us, as financial advicers, the real magic of AI hasn't been about surpassing market performance or dissecting SEC filings; it's been about how we've been able to partner more closely with our clients, gaining insights into their lives in ways that were previously unfathomable.”

Takeaway: David Ortiz is 64 years old. He is clearly not an ‘Old Broker’ and I hope you don’t become one either.