RIA Collective: Sam Sova | AI Coworkers Are Changing Advisory Firms

AI is everywhere in financial services, but most advisors are only scratching the surface.

In this episode of RIA Collective, host Charlie Van Derven sits down with Sam Sova, Co-Founder of Subatomic AI, to explore how artificial intelligence is moving beyond basic tools and becoming a true collaborative partner inside advisory firms.

Sam shares how RIAs can use AI to unify data across CRMs, custodians, portfolio platforms, email, and communication tools. The result is fewer manual tasks, more efficiency, and the ability to break through growth ceilings without adding headcount.

Together, Charlie and Sam discuss:

• Why AI is at a “1995 moment,” similar to the early internet
• How advisors are losing more than 40% of their time to tasks AI can now handle
• Why meeting preparation is one of the biggest hidden time drains in advisory firms
• How AI coworkers can automatically generate agendas, insights, and recommendations
• The future of personalized client journeys and proactive touchpoints
• How Subatomic approaches security, compliance, and transparency for RIAs
• Why AI is not about replacing people, but about doing more with the same team

Sam also explains how Subatomic helps firms save hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of hours per year. That time can be reinvested where it matters most: relationships, trust, and growth.

This episode is especially valuable for:

• Independent advisors and RIAs
• Firms hitting a growth ceiling
• Advisors curious about AI beyond note-taking tools
• Leaders planning for the next decade of advice

🎧 Watch now and subscribe to RIA Collective for conversations that help independent advisors grow, adapt, and lead the future of financial advice.

Connect with Sam Sova
🌐 Subatomic AI: https://subatomic.ai

Connect with Charlie Van Derven
🌐 Social Advisors: https://www.social-advisors.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlievanderven/

Chapters
00:00 – Why this episode is different
03:00 – AI’s “1995 moment”
07:45 – Where advisors lose the most time
11:00 – AI-powered meeting preparation explained
15:30 – Unifying data across advisor technology stacks
19:00 – Security, compliance, and transparency
22:30 – The future of AI coworkers in RIAs

Transcript

Charlie van Derven: 0:16

Thank you for joining me on another episode of RIA, a Collective. I'm your host, as always, Charlie van Derven. We're going in a little bit of a different direction with with this particular episode. Where those of you who have listened in the past, typically what we do is we're helping advisors transition into an independent space increase the trust in the industry, where I think that fiduciary role within an RIA certainly is impactful for some of the trust issues that financial services suffers. Today we'll go in a little different direction because I met a gentleman along the way named Sam Sova. Sam, welcome.

Sam Sova: 0:49

Thanks for having

Charlie van Derven: 0:49

me. Yeah, you got it, man. So Sam runs a a company called Subatomic ai, and from what I can tell, there's some tools out there in the industry. Of course, it's in its infancy but there's some AI tools in the industry that are doing some things. Sam, jump Zox. Those are, some of the call recording and CRM integrations that we see a lot of. You've taken it a little bit beyond, beyond what I'll call the tip of the iceberg with those tools. And, I don't know, from what I can tell, saving advisors hundreds of hours a year dozens of hours a month and meeting prep. That's an exciting use case scenario. And so I just wanna dive into that and, make our listeners aware of some of the front edge, front end tools that are out there, I should say, front edge tools that are out there because you guys are leading the way. Very much sam. Welcome, man. I do appreciate you spending some time with us and our listeners at RIA Collective.

Sam Sova: 1:40

Yeah. Thanks again for having me, Charlie.

Charlie van Derven: 1:42

Yeah, you got it. And we come from the same stomping grounds before we hit record. We were talking about cold, but Sam's in Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin, so I don't think we talked about it, but maybe we got some Green Bay packer affiliation. Hopefully not Chicago bears,

Sam Sova: 1:54

yes, absolutely.

Charlie van Derven: 1:55

Packers

Sam Sova: 1:55

all the way.

Charlie van Derven: 1:56

Very good, man. Very good. I don't know if I told you on our call, Sam, I brought a packer player to third grade show and tell.

Sam Sova: 2:04

I have a story for you too. I actually Ray Nitschke watched me and my friends in first grade play football. That's my story. Very cool.

Charlie van Derven: 2:12

My first job outta a college, and we're gonna go quick through this 'cause I want to get into subatomic. My first job outta a college was at a Radisson Inn in Green Bay, which is where all the personalities in town would stay when they came for NFL games. And and got a chance to meet Ray Tke shortly before he passed away. And a whole bunch of Packer players and all the NFL people like John Madden and Pat Summerall that would come through town. And so anyway,

Sam Sova: 2:33

love that.

Charlie van Derven: 2:33

I was extremely starstruck. I think, I'd be more starstruck over that than than a Hollywood celebrity not Absolutely. It's just my bias in life.

Sam Sova: 2:41

Awesome. I'm

Charlie van Derven: 2:41

jealous. Yeah, man. Yeah, man, that's awesome. Let's jump in, man. Listen I I would. Say, what was it you? You can correct me if I'm wrong, but chat GPT launched November 22, I believe it was, might've been 21 if we've been using it that long, whatever it was by January, 2023. So a couple months later we were monitoring what that was all about and we started incorporating AI into social advisors, specifically content creation. Was the simplest way to jump into it. It changed the way I do business. It changed the way we structured our business. Here we are, three years beyond that. Sam, you've got your finger on the pulse more than I do. Dude, I'm stoked to hear about Subatomic and dive into some of the details. So how did you, first off, you I grew up in this industry, from doing websites way back in the day To where we are today. How did you choose financial services as where you wanted to stake your, stake your flag and jump in with an AI tool?

Sam Sova: 3:37

Yeah, sure. So we started in 2023, and I have a co-founder, his name's Carl Simon. He is our CTO. And Carl was building complex projects. I was doing more of the consulting side. We come from the Fortune five hundreds doing the same thing, figuring out challenges, how do you solve 'em with technology? And that's really what we were doing at the early stages of ai. And what we found very quickly, you start talking to your network and your friends, and we found out that after talking to hundreds of leaders in this industry, there were common problems that we could really address with this long term. That were not just point and click solutions, right? Yeah. That were major pain points, not just for efficiency, but to really drive growth in an industry that is completely changing. So that's where we started.

Charlie van Derven: 4:22

Very cool, man. I one of the things that keeps a lot of people out of financial services is compliance. And so I think we need to talk a little bit about that today. But before we dive in, what were some of those problems that you and you and Carl identified that you guys, were positioned to create solutions for?

Sam Sova: 4:37

Yeah, at a macro level, when you think about technology, it was, Hey, we're experimenting with ai. But it's, it's just another tool to the tool set. So I have 15 tools I have to log into every day. Now I'm adding 16, 17, 18. The tools we have some AI capabilities, but they're just kinda wrappers on the current tool that we have. It's not moving the needle. They don't move they don't actually work into our workflows. And I just don't have this unified view of our data, which I feel, and this is comments we got, the people we talked to felt like that should be possible now with ai. So that's where we started. And then at a macro level, just 41%, it depends where you look, but the stat I have, 41% of advisor time is spent on tasks that. Quite frankly, we don't believe they have to do anymore. They need to be in front of clients. Yeah. And that is where the value is in this space is relationships. And that's what we've no questions over and over. So when we talk about growth, like what we're creating and what I'm gonna talk about further with you, Charlie, is really to break through that growth ceiling where we can do more with same, right? So we can grow without necessarily hiring incremental people to do backend work. Which I think is extremely interesting to all the RAs that we talked to.

Charlie van Derven: 5:55

Yeah. I'm sure, man, and I we're gonna talk a little bit about meeting prep. Sure. I can only imagine, if you've got, 150 clients and pot, potentially that's 300 review meetings a year. One for just about every day when you pull the weekends out. Yeah. There's gotta be an hour of prep, whether it's assistant or the advisor themselves. Putting time into meeting prep, and I know we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about that. And just, in, in that, in that scenario, of course they've gotta review everything, so maybe it's 15 minutes instead of an hour, but in that scenario, you're saving hundreds, 200, 300 hours a year.

Sam Sova: 6:30

Yeah. Yeah. So let's you wanna dig into that? We can dig into meeting prep and some of the other things.

Charlie van Derven: 6:35

Yeah. There, there's a couple things that I, I wanna make sure we talked about meeting prep. I also when we were getting acquainted you talked about the client or the prospect journey and, more touch points, but also more meaningful touch points, right? Based on who that person is versus. We do a lot of marketing automation, and in, in many cases, the message is the same. We segment people within that marketing automation, but if you fit in that segment, the messaging is the same for you as it would be the next person in that segment. So let's start with meeting prep and then we'll get into the more touch points.

Sam Sova: 7:03

Yeah, and I can talk macro too, to actually, if you're okay with that. I'd like to start there on how we think of this and then roll in a meeting prop. Dude, it's

Charlie van Derven: 7:11

Your time.

Sam Sova: 7:13

So I, so we, just taking a step back, we think AI is almost at that 1995 moment. We talked about this a little bit, Charlie, right? Yeah. Like email come, comes up websites and like we when that happened. Nobody really had the context to what was going to come next. And what came next was dramatic, right? You had social media, you had the iPhone, Blackberry, you had different hardware and work changed forever after that, right? Yeah. I don't think anybody can argue that. Work and our lives change. We actually think the same thing with ai, right? So many people are thinking of this as just the next phase of technology of what they're currently doing, hence the wrappers. And some point and click solutions, like note takers, they're great, but that's not gonna dramatically change the growth trajectory of your IRA. So we think of this as like this is the pivotal moment that it's going to change. So what is the first thing you have to do, right? You have to unify our data. RAs in general have 15 different tools that they're accessing on a regular basis to get client information. So the way we look at it is you don't have to get rid of your tools. You already trust these tools a lot of them you need to use to make transactions and so on. So we orchestrate across all those tools, essentially create what those are familiar with of a data warehouse, data lake. Put a vector store on top of it, which makes it easy for AI to access. And when we do that, we have one view of our entire business. More importantly, one view of every customer. And now when you incorporate AI meeting prep you now have access to be able to do that in a matter of seconds versus ours. And that's how we look at it. We look at AI as. The fundamental thing you need to do is this orchestration and then the possibilities of what we do next to significantly grow the business is really endless of the possibilities we can do.

Charlie van Derven: 9:12

That's pretty cool. So when we talk about tools, we're obviously talking about CRM, right? Yeah. Redtail Wealthbox and Salesforce derivatives. And then, for a lot of our clients they've got a client, CRM, and then they've got a prospect, CRM. Yeah, we are, we're a reseller. Go high level. But there's other, there's other good platforms out there portfolio tools, right? Orion and, black Diamond and these types of portfolio management tools. What else do you put in there?

Sam Sova: 9:37

Custodial platforms.

Charlie van Derven: 9:38

Custodial platforms,

Sam Sova: 9:39

right. Email. Email. Most RAs have now dabbled with note takers, right?

Charlie van Derven: 9:44

Yep.

Sam Sova: 9:44

Client communications via email, RingCentral, if we're using that for text. Yeah.

Charlie van Derven: 9:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Sova: 9:50

It goes on. The way that we've orchestrated this is like API connections are not good enough, right? Because if. Something on the endpoint changes or something with the host changes, like it breaks everything. So we, so I mentioned co-founder Carl, our CTO. His background is deep in data and integrations for the last 25 years or so. So like we built this platform knowing that. APIs weren't gonna cut it. So we have proprietary technology where we can use what we call AI coworkers to actually go in and get all this data in the platforms that APIs, F-S-F-T-P servers, et cetera, just don't get us to give that full view. And now we can pull it into one centralized area and orchestrate AI across that. That to us, that is the sweet spot where. Growth is inevitable for whoever does that.

Charlie van Derven: 10:44

That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Yeah. So where do you wanna start? You wanna talk about meeting prep, you wanna

Sam Sova: 10:48

talk about points? Sure. So like that example is great. We, in listening to the market, we know that meeting prep is just a complete time suck, but it's necessary. Yeah. So if you think about what I just explained of orchestrating all your data, so let's think about. Client, let's say Jane Smith. Jane Smith is in our CRM. We have emails, we have texts we have maybe some calls we've recorded. We have our custodial data and then all these other ancillary tools, Charlie, like you mentioned, right? So what we're able to do is take all that information and now create an agenda for a meeting. It can be anything that an organization wants from two pages. To 10 pages to visual. The output is now actually fairly easy with the AI platform that we built, right? Because we have AI building this, that can be done faster than ever. Yeah. We can do it in a dashboard, et cetera. But now what we can do is we can actually have one of our AI coworkers go in the calendars of all the advisors. And a week before the meeting, send all their agendas for them to review ahead of time and then collaborate with our AI team. We call it AI coworkers, to make any modifications right ahead of the meeting. Sync the data to be real time, and they walk into that meeting ready to go. And it's not just automation. What we're talking about is AI actually making recommendations of what you should talk about based on age. Maybe where they live. Maybe they're where they're at in life, if they have kids in college, things like that, right? So it's not just pure automation, it's actually having our AI coworkers think and make recommendations for us. It's pretty impressive.

Charlie van Derven: 12:27

That's pretty awesome. And I'm sure, as with anything, when you've got human involvement there's even, even if a seasoned advisor or a seasoned assistant is pulling notes together, there's gonna be gaps left. Right? Based on their biases, based on things they're not even considering. Maybe they didn't look at the last three emails before they jumped into that meeting. That's pretty awesome, man.

Sam Sova: 12:46

Yeah. Yeah. And let me even paint a kind of a bigger picture of how we see the future, and these are things we're even doing today. Memory, right? Cognitive workflows. Maybe some of you that are listening have read about this. But we built this into our platform where it learns over time, right? So as you give feedback, as an individual advisor or a at a firm level, we can build that feedback and memory into. How we now give outputs in the future, right? So we like to think of this again, I keep saying AI coworker, like if you're gonna hire somebody right? As you hire them, you're gonna train them, you're gonna give them access to your tools and data. We think about the exact same thing with how we build our AI coworkers on top of your data.

Charlie van Derven: 13:30

Yeah.

Sam Sova: 13:31

And if you hire somebody new, you're going to give them feedback along the way, right? You're gonna train 'em up. Same thing with our AI coworkers, but they incorporate it super fast and we'll make the changes right away. And never forget the feedback that you gave 'em.

Charlie van Derven: 13:47

That's that's pretty awesome, man. When you engage with an RIA Sam, what does that look like? There's only so many tools being used in the industry, but when you start pulling six or seven different, portfolio platforms and custodial and CRMs, there's a heck of a mix. Is that a custom fit for every RIA or have you guys developed something that kind of plug and plays?

Sam Sova: 14:07

So we, so it is it's tailored for every RA meaning. We don't just have a set of integrations. I really think that thinking is old school of just like we have integrations with these partners, again, with our AI capabilities, we're able to pull all the data into this database of whatever you want from these platforms. So when we engage with the RIA, we're looking at, what are the key use cases? What are your key pain points, and then what are the platforms that you use that we're gonna address those pain points with? We orchestrate it. We actually have internal platform called Nexus and Nucleus. This is pretty crazy, Charlie, we haven't talked about this yet. Where we can take a recording of that call where somebody walks through their pain points and the tools that they have, we can then create an integration plan through ai, a workflow of how they're, how it's going to work within ai. We get the sign off from the customer. Yep. This is what we talked about. And now we can actually have our AI coworkers build a team of AI coworkers highly tailored to that organization for the use cases that they have. Try to wrap your head around that, right?

Charlie van Derven: 15:18

Yeah. It's,

Sam Sova: 15:19

I mean, it's it, you're talking about like data warehousing. This was like a 12 to 18 month. Thing even six months ago. This currently for some people that we talked to. Yeah. And we're talking three months maybe. That's

Charlie van Derven: 15:34

awesome.

Sam Sova: 15:35

So speed, velocity, we have this, our CTOI gotta give Carl credit for this. Adapt, evolve, and scale. That's how we think about our organization, but we think about our clients, right? So as they adapt and they evolve, we're able to scale with them, with what we're doing in the capabilities we've built internally to move super fast as they grow.

Charlie van Derven: 15:54

That is awesome, man. Subatomics doing some fun stuff, dude.

Sam Sova: 15:57

Clearly, I'm pretty excited about it.

Charlie van Derven: 15:59

Yeah, me too. Me too. What a, yeah, it was a aple, a pleasure to meet you when we did. And and I, we're exposed to, like you said, that kind of, that, I don't mean to be, I don't mean this to sound negative, it probably will, but I don't, that's not how I intended it. But we're at the tip of the iceberg when we look at tools like Jump and Zox and some of these common tools in the industry, which, I'll tell you what, when an advisor sits down and looks at their capability and it's gonna record my calls, it's gonna dump my CRM know it's gonna draft me an email. Already, they're looking at saving how many hundreds of hours a year. You guys take it to the next level with meeting prep and, automated touch points throughout

Sam Sova: 16:36

a journey.

Charlie van Derven: 16:37

Yeah.

Sam Sova: 16:37

Boarding. Yeah. So I think I, one more thing I really want to hit here is I think the traditional way we think about software. We've proven completely changed it. It has completely changed with ai, meaning you get a demo and you gotta fit into this box of what's been shown to you,

Charlie van Derven: 16:53

right?

Sam Sova: 16:54

We literally had a request, Hey, can you show us some dashboarding capabilities that you have? And we're like, sure. What do you want to see? They laid out what they wanted to see, literally 24 hours later within. Our internal capabilities, nexus and Nucleus, we spun up a dashboard with dummy data, exactly how they wanted. You could click into it. This is completely changing everything, which is why I went back to 95 and think that, in their mid nineties. Because this is the pace we're moving at.

Charlie van Derven: 17:24

Yeah. And I, I've shared with you on our conversations, I started putting websites together. I was on the sales and marketing side. That was, it was in 1998 and was with a company that was doing wirehouse website. So we get a contract with a big firm, and then, our resale, our opportunities were with the advisors. Due to 98 people didn't want to pay 25 bucks a month for a website. And now it's such an integral part and maybe it's even fading out at this point, but

Sam Sova: 17:48

yeah.

Charlie van Derven: 17:49

Here we are 27 years later. Pains me to say a little bit. But and for the last decade and two, two and a half decades, it's been a central point of their business.

Sam Sova: 17:58

Yeah. And we, and but we think of this as equating it to hires, right? So you shouldn't think of this as we're buying new software.

Charlie van Derven: 18:07

Yeah.

Sam Sova: 18:07

We're actually hiring ai. That's how we think of it. Yeah. And that's how it's going to work. And we're actually not saying bring us in and we're gonna, we're gonna cut a bunch of people. We're saying, let's think about how we do more with the same, let's reallocate people that are doing this, heavy lifting and move them more to the front of the house potentially. Yeah. Love that relationship. Driven more touch points. That's critical. Yeah.

Charlie van Derven: 18:29

Love that.

Sam Sova: 18:29

The relationship. Yeah. I want to hit on if you're okay with it. One more thing. You asked about compliance and audit. Yep. I didn't wanna, so from day one, again, Carl and I come from Fortune five hundred's consulting background and financial services, and we knew security and compliance was gonna be huge.

Charlie van Derven: 18:49

Yep.

Sam Sova: 18:49

Couple things about our platform. One, from day one, we can actually build this within the IT infrastructure of an IRA and that's how we deploy it. So your, it has complete security and boundaries on what's going on. Second, we have a product that we have called Subatomic Deep Lens. We'll actually be doing an actual release of this, but we just build it into every project where you can see either as a user or an admin exactly what is going on behind the scenes with these AI coworkers and how they're accessing data and getting you answers to whatever. Question you have or proactively whatever they're doing for you. So like complete transparency auditability, introspective, evaluation. And this is core to our platform and we think trust and transparency, especially around what we're seeing now with Mt thought, that where AI agents are creating social networks and all this crazy stuff. Like we need to keep. Trust, security and compliance at the forefront, which is exactly where we started with this.

Charlie van Derven: 19:49

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And that, and such an important aspect for this industry, right? It's like I said, it's an industry I've loved working in because, for a lot of reasons. But we've been running an agency for 12, 13 years in financial services and compliance. Keeps people out. Agencies are very much a diamond dozen these days. And the compliance and security financial services makes it a little more difficult to penetrate this particular industry. Putting some insulation, there's plenty of'em out there, but putting some insulation for businesses like the one I own,

Sam Sova: 20:20

yeah.

Charlie van Derven: 20:20

Yeah. Sam, before we close, where's it going, man? You're giving us a snapshot of what the capabilities are today, but what's tomorrow look like? Do we know?

Sam Sova: 20:29

For subatomic, you're gonna see us all over. We were pretty stealth last year. Yeah. We wanted to build out a great couple use cases. We have one that some people have seen. We're saving a client 8,000 hours this year just on Wow. Meeting prep and some of those things. Yeah.

Charlie van Derven: 20:44

Wow.

Sam Sova: 20:45

Yeah. One, $1.3 billion firm. 8,000 hours. They're gonna save just on meeting prep and some client. Engagement type things. So we're really like, you're gonna see us all around. But I think again, this space we can't think of it as these point solutions and software as we've known it. That's not where this is gonna go. There's gonna be new hardware out there, there's gonna be completely new ways of working and we're really bullish on AI, coworkers being our collaborative partner. To just help us grow and get things done and collaborate. And we're excited about it. And like I said, we're extremely bullish on it.

Charlie van Derven: 21:24

Yeah, dude. That it, it is very exciting. So you guys are taking it another step as to what, what the industry has seen so far. Dude, I'm excited to see where Subatomic goes. We

Sam Sova: 21:33

will stay in touch. I'll keep giving you updates, Charlie.

Charlie van Derven: 21:35

Yeah, for sure, man. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I'll make sure that I'm following you on LinkedIn so I can see updates there. And I don't do a lot of, I don't do a lot of conferences anymore. Part of me misses that part of it, there's FOMO there, so maybe we jump back into a conference, conference circuit, but I'm sure we'll see you guys around. Main stage boost, whatever it is, right? Gotta get that. Yeah,

Sam Sova: 21:55

absolutely.

Charlie van Derven: 21:55

Yeah. We'll be all

Sam Sova: 21:56

over the place.

Charlie van Derven: 21:57

I'm excited to help you get the name out in any way I can, man. I've got we've got a little bit of a network we built over the years awesome. So hap happy to introduce Subatomic to it.

Sam Sova: 22:05

Fantastic.

Charlie van Derven: 22:06

Yeah,

Sam Sova: 22:07

it was great connecting with you one wisconsinite to another.

Charlie van Derven: 22:10

Yeah, man. Go pack our or something. Sam Sova, thank you so much for being my guest on RIA Collective. And for our listeners, thanks for taking taking some time to meet my new friend, Sam, and learn a little bit about Subatomic. Maybe maybe AI helps us change the the trust issues within financial services. Sam, let's see if we work. I

Sam Sova: 22:27

think it will.

Charlie van Derven: 22:28

I hope so, man. I hope so.

Sam Sova: 22:30

All right.

Charlie van Derven: 22:31

Thanks, Sam. Appreciate it, dude.