Are These AI Agents for Financial Planners the best in 2026?

What if financial advisers could spend 70%… or even 100% of their time with clients?

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In this episode of Financial Planner Life, we sit down with Alan Gurung, founder of AdvisoryAI, to explore how AI is reshaping the way advice firms operate.

From disconnected tech stacks and time-heavy admin, to compliance bottlenecks and the growing advice gap, this conversation gets to the core of what’s really holding advisers back.

Alan shares how AI agents like Colin, Evie and Atlas are already helping firms reduce admin, improve compliance oversight, and uncover insights hidden across multiple systems.

But this isn’t just about technology: It’s about time.

Because if advisers can spend more of it with clients, everything changes: capacity, growth, and the ability to serve more people.

If you’re thinking about the future of financial advice or how to scale without burning out, this episode is for you.

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 – Introducing AdvisoryAI & the vision

01:55 – From financial planner to AI builder

03:17 – Why financial advice doesn’t scale

06:12 – The advice gap explained

09:47 – The biggest bottlenecks in advice firms

12:40 – Introducing Atlas: connecting the tech stack

14:18 – Real-world AI use cases for advisers

18:24 – The future of AI in financial planning

28:05 – Meet the AI agents: Evie, Emma & Colin

43:05 – Rethinking compliance with AI

48:58 – Increasing capacity & serving more clients

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Transcript

Meet The AI Agents

SPEAKER_00 0:02

So today we're talking about Colin, Emma, and Evie, and not forgetting Atlas. They're not new hires at Financial Planner Life, they're AI agents already working in financial planning firms, and they're having a huge impact. Alan Grang was a financial planner before he built advisory AI. He lived the late nights, the suitability reports, the compliance loops, and decided to rebuild the system instead of accepting it. So, today we're talking about AI that doesn't replace advisors, but instead gives them their time back. So let's get into it. Alan, thanks so much for joining me today on the Financial Planner Live Podcast. How are you? Really good. How are you? I'm very well. I'm really excited to finally sit down with you and talk about advisory AI, some of the fantastic stuff you're doing for financial planners at the moment, saving them time, making them more money, and deploying these fantastic AI agents that you have. We've got Colin, we've got Evie, we've got Emma, and the new kid on the block. Atlas. So today we're going to find out how you deploy them, what problems they are solving, and why I kind of consider you to be one of the biggest challenges out there in the AI space for financial planners. And that's just not from my opinion, that's from the clients that I work with. Hey, Foster De Novo. Serious positive feedback from them. Awesome. They've been using this and they love it. So let's tell the rest of the profession about the fantastic work you're doing there. Advisory AI. But I think first of all, I think we need to go back to the beginning because you know you're not someone who just woke up one day and said, I'm going to build an AI AI tool to financial planners. Wouldn't that be good, right? That would be fantastic. What an epitome that would be, yeah. A message from God. Yeah. No. So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to build advisory AI. Sure.

From Planner To Problem Solver

SPEAKER_02 1:55

You know, it's quite funny actually. I think back at um, you know, when you end up watching YouTube videos, yeah, and people end up giving tons of financial advice, and by the end of this, they're not a financial advisor, this is not financial advice. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be fantastic if I could say, no, I'm a financial advisor, I can actually give advice. Yeah. So growing up, I always thought it was somewhat of a secret, it's like a superpower. Um, you end up saying, of all the things that um, I I wish I learned this in school, I wish I was educated on this, but you can be, and I feel like it's a superpower that a lot of advisors have. Um, so I had that, and I love the process of giving financial planning uh to all of my clients. But one of the things I found is there's a diseconomy in scale. As an advisor, one of the main things that you do is you provide incredibly personalized advice. Biggest challenge of giving personalized advice is it's just not scalable. And so eventually what you end up finding out as you end up creating more clients, you have a huge team of support staff and compliance team to go ahead and allow you to and enable you to go ahead and give advice. But eventually you come to this conundrum. Do you continue to hire more people to have a higher cost for your business, or do you end up taking on some of that load and start doing some of that administration yourself? And for better or for worse, I ended up choosing the latter. So I find myself doing taking about 60% of my time doing admin work as opposed to actually giving advice. And I thought, oh what am I? Is this really what I enjoy? Is this what I love? And I came to the conclusion that it's not. And I ended up going away from my business at the time. I took a couple of months off, some somewhat vowing and saying that financial planning just isn't for me. Um but I kept on coming back to this thing that well, I I love giving financial advice, you know. I I love the process of being a part of someone's life to such a granular extent, uh, and to be able to help people on some of their most vulnerable uh some of the most important things that they aim to do going forward. And I thought, okay, is there anything out there that could if I was in that shoe now? What would I love to have? Yeah. And I looked down at the market and I thought it's just not there. And I said, well, why wait? Um, and that's kind of how the whole vision of advisor AI started. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

So you were a financial planner. How long were you a financial planner for? Uh three going into four years. Were you a successful financial planner?

SPEAKER_02 4:20

I I did okay. So I I mean, in my first year, we brought on about a hundred families um that we looked after. Uh I loved every single one of them. I um I treated them as my own. Um, it's fantastic. I remember uh kind of vivid. Um I remember I went to my family and I'm a I'm Nepalese by background. And so what we ended up doing was I said to my entire family chat, and we've got a big old family, right? Mum's got four brothers, four sisters, dad's got four brothers. And so I said, Look, guys, if anyone wants financial advice, I've just started my own business. Before I know it, there's about 80 groings who are all signing up saying, fantastic, give me some advice, right? But but the average uh the average income that uh the groings I had in my family at least came to about 50, 60,000.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

And I so and I so initially I thought, fantastic, I'm giving all these people advice, they're getting a lot better off. But eventually I was finding, oh, uh, this is just not sustainable. And I I I came to almost an uncomfortable realization that if I wanted to continue making my company profitable, I'd have to decide on taking higher net worth clients and um stopping my process of giving advice to some of my family. And I thought that was super uncomfortable for me. Um I thought uh surely there's a way around this. Surely technology has advanced in a way that we can make this scalable. I think there is now, I don't think there was back then. Um so hopefully we're on the process again there with advisory AI.

The Advice Gap Economics

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Do you think that's had an impact on the advice gap then? So people not being able to scale their businesses, not being able to deliver the level of advice that they want to, time wasted on tasks that are taking them away from actually going out and seeing clients. Because it's some crazy stat. I looked at your white paper around the amount of households out there have got around 100,000, I think.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yeah, what was that? Um 19 million. So 19 million households in the UK um have over 100,000 investable assets, yet they do not have any financial advisor. Um so we when we went through this, we found there's like um rounding up about three million who's getting advice, but there's 19 million who's not. Um, not to say that they're doing the wrong things with their money, but I suppose the challenge comes here with imagine what they could be doing with their money if they had someone who's seen um from all of their clients all the good, all the bad, gone through those processes before, challenging you on some of the things that you're doing, holding you accountable for the things that you say you're going to do. Uh it's also why the retention rate for financial advisors is so high on an industry average comes about 98%, because that's because people find the incredible value that advisors provide. It is a superpower, but the economies uh the economics of taking on a client of that range doesn't make sense. If you're going to take on a client with 300,000 investable assets to someone else who's got 50,000 investable assets, you find the administration comes just being somewhat similar for both of them. So as an advisor, you come to some you'd incentivize to go ahead with the person with the higher investable assets there. So it's uh I see the challenge. I'm sure you come across this yourself, right, with all the advising firms you work with. I'm sure huge.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yeah. Everyone sees it as an opportunity, they just don't quite know how to get there to actually service those clients. And the ability to actually do that because it takes them away from profitable clients that are good use of their time, um, it's very, very difficult. And most people want to be able to service those clients. They do, you know, and it's a huge market, but you know, it's the ability to do that in the right way that's not going to absolutely burn you out at the same time and take you away from um from making a living. I mean, you see the current state of the market as like an you know, the advice gap, for instance, is injustice. You know, you said that to me when we were in our pre-podcast chat. But what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_02 8:14

Injustice is a strong word, isn't it? But I completely believe in it. Um, it's a huge injustice. It's almost similar to look, we're all going through life for the first time, and we we work and we work hard, and so we work for the money that we end up obtaining on a month by month or week by week basis. But to go through life and not have the expertise of someone else who's seen other people go through that process and being able to translate that onto yourself and what you should do, that is an incredible injustice. It's almost similar to you going to court without a lawyer. How on earth are you meant to do well there? Right? You just uh you cannot, you cannot fight that battle. Right, or rather, let me step back of it. You can fight that battle, it's just incredibly challenging. And it's a complete injustice that in the UK only 8% of the population have access to financial advice. And I don't think that's uh um the advisors or the practitioners' challenge. I think there's a structural challenge that needs to be changed around how an advice firm works. Um, but that's also because of the level of personalization that's required and the level of compliance that needs to be in place in order for us to give advice. I love it.

Suitability Reports And Paperwork Pain

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Personalization is a big deal for advisory AI, and it's a big deal for you. And we're gonna get into that in a minute, I think. But I want to talk about some of the bottlenecks, okay? Because why so you know, things like suitability reports, but annual reviews, that's a big old bottleneck for a business, right? And this is the thing that comes up the most when I talk to people. Tell us a little bit about your experience of that and why.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Sure. Um so on the white paper as well, we did a survey with TrustNet with over 150 wealth management firms, and we found out uh the average came to about 40% of companies spend more than an hour, and about 30% of companies spend up to seven hours on certain suitability letters every time they write it up. It's a significant amount of your time that's going into writing up these incredibly personalized and heavily compliant documents. It's uh it's it's a huge challenge. Uh, another stat that we found fascinating in the survey was 45% of advisors came out saying um because of the amount of paperwork that needs to be done, they reduced the amount of advice that they could give onto new clients or the prospects that they were speaking to, in which case they had to say, we can't take you on. And that's a scary thought to know that because it's so personalized, because it's so heavily compliant, uh in one way, as it should be, uh we as advisors cannot go ahead and scale our businesses the way that we want to.

Advisory AI Growth And Structure

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Brilliant. Well, look, massive problem. Yeah. You've set up advise advisory AI to fix this problem. Just tell us a little bit about your journey with advisory AI. Where are you in the journey? What's it been like? Who are you working with? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Um God, it's been a fantastic journey. It's been a hell of a whirlwind. So we started about two coming on to three years ago now, um, working with just over 400 firms. Um we personally think some of the best companies in the industry, including the likes of Foster DeNovo, Finlay, Brooks MacDonald, TJP, right, Radcliffe to name a few. Big names. Right, awesome names. Um, and that um it's been fantastic working with some of them, rather, let's say all of them. And um, I think it's coming on to about three, coming on to nearly 4,000 users. So it's been an incredible journey. And uh throughout that process, we've essentially layered on the business of a wealth management firm into three sections, which is advice, and that's our AI agent Evie. Uh we have support staff, which is our AI agent Emma, and then we've got compliance, which is our AI agent Colin. And over the past three years now, we've been able to divert these three AI agents into different individuals and firms that we work with to end up creating this workflow that hope hopefully creates a seamless process to go ahead and give advice.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

I love it. Brilliant. So, how long's we going for again, sorry?

SPEAKER_02 12:22

Coming on three years now.

Atlas Links Your Tech Stack

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Three years, fantastic. Listen, I want to get right into it, right into the tools that you have and the solutions that it's offering financial planners, right? And get some real kind of real-world examples of how brilliant advisory AI actually is. So let's just start at the beginning. This new kid on the block, because you've got a brand new product, haven't you? It's called Atlas. So tell us big old name. There's a big old name, Atlas. I absolutely love it. It's funny because I just come from doing some filming with Titan Wealth this week. You've got Titan Wealth, now you've got Atlas. I feel like I want to bring those two together. Titan meets Atlas. Yeah. Sounds like a battle, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Greek mythology there as well. It's Greek mythology, absolutely. Yeah. Well, um, so Atlas has been our best kept secret for the past six months now. Um, doesn't seem like a long time in the AI world. That's a gosh, a long time. So one of the things that we found is as an advisor or a support staff or largely anyone within an advice firm, they use a multiple different tech stacks. That might include your Outlook for emails, could use cashless modeling, platforms for investing, uh, your CRM software. And essentially you have data in multiple areas within your uh advice firm. What we've done with Atlas is we've um recently partnered with Zero Key, and Zero Key ends up connecting and integrating with about 40 different tech stacks, technology companies in the wealth management industry. The amazing thing about Atlas is Atlas connects with all of them. So, what that means, you as an advisor, you can just ask a super simple question. Atlas will interrogate all of those different platforms that you already use on a day-by-day basis, consolidate all of that, and you get the answer all in one platform now, as opposed to you having to go anywhere else. So imagine, imagine if um let's say you're trying to find out well how many of my clients have not utilized their ice allowance, but have excess cash available to actually invest into an ICE. Now, if you're an advisor, what would you have to do for this? You'd got to go through your entire CRM system, you've got to find out all of your clients how much uh how much they're currently putting into ICE allowance, if anything, and then figure out how much cash balance do they have. And does it make sense for them to do that? Atlas can go ahead and research all of that, give you an answer in about a minute.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

That's pretty amazing because one of the biggest problems around implementation of AI and just tech in general within financial planning, is a lot of people say to me, they just don't communicate with each other. So you're going in one system for this, one system for that, one program, you know, uh another tech. They talk about tech stacks, right? And it's uber confusing and trying to connect them all and having all these little uh processes and automations and systems in place. It's overwhelming for somebody who works in that space, let alone the financial planner, right? And I can imagine that's just a massive barrier to entry when it comes to using AI. How many people are using AI at the moment in the financial planning world just out of interest?

SPEAKER_02 15:13

Um we kind of put it at around 20-25%. Wow. As in like an AI specific to financial advisors. Yeah. Um there's obviously others who are using devices of ChatGPT and Claude, which are a little more general, yeah, but still a huge portion of the market has yet to utilize specific domain AI.

Exclusivity And The Client Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Oh, sorry for interrupting the Financial Planner Life podcast. I hope you're enjoying it. Now, if you think that you would like to be a guest on the podcast, because you have a product, a service, or a business that you would like to promote, maybe you want to attract some new talent to your business, there is a link in the comments where you can actually apply to come on the Financial Planner Life podcast. You get that full end-to-end experience that you're so used to from the Financial Planner Life Studios. And if you feel like you've got a podcast that you'd like to start, or maybe a video project, again, click the link in the comments section and book a meeting, and let's discuss that project and get it going in 2026. Now, back to the show. Right, let's go back to the to Atlas then. This so I'm a financial advisor and I can just go straight into Atlas and it's gonna connect with all the different tech stacks that are out there, all the different systems platforms, and pull my information in. And you you have exclusivity over that.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

Yes, um, it's quite exciting what we're doing with Zero Key. We know the guys over there quite well, Joe who ends up running Zero Key. And um essentially they've decided only to partner with us on all AI fronts. So essentially, we are their AI partner to go ahead and um access this ride. We did something really exciting a couple of days ago and with one of our firms. Uh one of the questions I was asked was uh who has who currently has inadequate insurances in place? And so um what the day what the model did was go through all the different areas to um research and read as much of the data that's available there as possible. One of the interesting things they did was it started reading the documents as well, and uh it came by saying, hey, here's a series of people who have inadequate insurances, but also these five people who did have insurances have now got expired insurances. And how on earth are you meant to know that as an advisor? Yeah, um we think it would transform how advisors and advising firms will now work going forward, and the ambition here is now you can also be how good of an advisor will you also be now going forward, be able to say to a client, uh look, you had an insurance about 15 years ago, it's now expired. Um you now need to renew. How good do you look? Uh, and I think that's really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Does Atlas allow the advisor to log in and the client and see things from a client perspective? Can the client do that? The advisor do it? Is it for both?

SPEAKER_02 17:51

So at the moment it's only for the advising firm to go ahead and do that so they can get as much information as possible. Um we are currently working on the client side. I wasn't planning on telling you this right now. We may as well. Yeah, may as well. And that's an area that we think is super exciting as well. What if, with all the data that you already have as an advisor and all the things that you're currently doing as a firm, whether that's investment research or whether that's um around the financial goals and the reasons for why you've invested into an ISA as opposed to a SIP? Uh these are questions that a client might have and come back to you on a consistent basis via email. But what if you've already talked about all of these things and you had something that could speak on your behalf? Now it's something that advisors can choose to have or not choose to have. Anyway, we see that being further down the line. But for the moment, uh Atlas is something that uh advising and advising firms can utilize from their side only.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

It's the zapier, isn't it? It's the zapier of wealth management.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Completely. Yeah, it's uh it we've talked as an industry about the single source of truth for a long time now, but it's incredibly challenging to do that because typically that is a CRM. But the fact of the matter is, as an advising firm, you don't only use your CRM, you also use your cash flow modeling, and you go into incredible detail on that. Um, and and the process of trying to get all of your other data sets from all the different tech sites that you use all into one place like your CRM, that's incredibly time consuming. So it doesn't always get done. Uh and in those cases that it doesn't get done, now you have Atlas that can essentially grab any data that you want for you.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

So Zero Key have actually chosen to do that exclusively with you. I want to know why. Why did they choose you?

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Um well, I I suppose as a humble brag, if if I'm brilliant. If I may is that well, um so recently we we were at a um at the EATT conference, and there was uh over 200 advisor advisors over there, and um they're voting around what uh who was the who's the best technology that they've seen. And um advisory AI has become by far none number one, which is fantastic, right? This is what we live for. Um but more exciting than that, uh we've run it now for three years in a row, uh, and so it's a huge confirmation around what advisors are experiencing, what they're seeing, and what they're loving. We're pushing what innovation really means in the advising industry. Um and we work incredibly closely with all of our advisors. Uh you know, we're one of the few advisor um AI tech software out there who's come out and said, here's a white paper from a third-party consultant that has proven those firms that are utilizing our tech have increased their valuation by 3x. That's an example. Another one is with firms coming out and case studies that we've launched on advising firms that have been able to double the amount of clients that each advisor is looking at uh directly because of the amount of help that the AI agents have been able to provide. Um, we're yet to see case studies like that from anyone else. And Zeriki came forward and said, look, um, this is evidence-backed case studies that showcases this.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

I want to make it clear as well, anybody listening to this right now, there is a link in the comments. You can download that white paper. Um, this is a very exciting time for you. I do love the fact that you've gone out and done the research and you've got evidence to back it up, which obviously is clear why they've decided to go exclusive with you. Just out of interest, like it's a very competitive world, AI, uh within financial planning. I've been looking at some of the um US companies as well. It is hyper competitive. Um something like Atlas sounds really unique. Not come across it. Yeah. What's just stopping another AI company having a solution in a system like that? How is you know, is is it is it something that you've got and you're you're ahead of the game and if firms start using it then they're ahead of the game? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Uh it's um a really good question. I so I would put it down into two specific reasons. One, our boys over at Zero Keys done incredibly well. And so they've essentially spent the past two years now integrating with about 40 different companies. It takes an incredible amount of time to go ahead with integration. If anyone else wants to go ahead and do that in the financial advising industry, we're talking about them getting to the place that we are now, two years later. Right. Because it takes that long to go ahead and integrate with all of these different platforms. And that's only from the development side, that's also from the side of these other tech companies agreeing to integrate with you. So there's twofolds there. There's the second part of that is we are hyper-personalization through and through. And what that means is for any advising firm that is now using the platform and using Atlas, the more you use it, the more it becomes specific to your own tone of voice, specifically to your firm. Right. So say any other tech providers, whether it's the US or the UK, doesn't do end up creating something like Atlas. We're talking about them getting to the stage two years later, but also that is two years worth of conversation that you've now had with Atlas, where it completely understands exactly how you want these responses to be. And something that's super exciting that we're also rolling out with Atlas is Atlas understanding what you want before you end up asking it. If every morning you end up going to and saying, hey, what does my day look like? And give me a summary of every meeting that I have at 9 a.m., Atlas will start to recognize, great, Sam's asking the same question every single day at the same time. Why don't I just answer that before he even gets to it? And that's another area where it just the more conversation, the better it continues to get for you.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

I love it. I'm going to ask you a question. Um, and it's like a hopefully some of our listeners don't know the answer as well. So in your world, this is like bread and butter to you. Generative AI, does that play a part in Atlas?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Yeah, absolutely. There is um there's a series of different AIs out there. I mean, AI's been around for a long old time. Um, generative AI is essentially a way for um AI to go ahead and take a question that you've been asked and to regurgitate it in the form that uh it believes humans would like. But essentially, generative AI is trained upon millions of data sets of how humans interact with one another. So what it's essentially doing is replicating how humans speak. And so it's taking a bit of information that it's hopefully received in the past and going ahead and regurgitating the information that it's also seen in the past based on this data. So the more data it has, the better it becomes, similar to this point that I have around hyperpersonalization without this.

Why Hyper-Personalisation Matters

SPEAKER_00 24:42

I love it. Yeah, and the hyper-personalization is such a big part of advisory AI. Let's get into that. Why is it such a big part of advisory AI? Why do you feel the need to really double down on hyperpersonalization?

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Yeah. I mean, you know, the worst thing you can get is a generic AI. Uh uh, you get an email and you you can just tell it's AI. Yep. Isn't that the worst? Yes, 100%. Right? It's the worst. And you almost feel like this person hasn't tried. Yep. Um, this person doesn't take me seriously enough. So then uh I've got this generic AI. It's lazy. That's it, spot on, it's lazy. Give me some time. And look, we as an advising firms, we're we're trying to scale ourselves to be uh look after as many clients as we can in an efficient manner. So it needs to have a hyper-personalization. It is a non-negotiable uh firms who have specific templates that have their own branding, their own tone of voice, their own formatting, their own way of speaking to their clients. It needs to be specific to that. Um to use a template that's off the shelf, uh, it can absolutely be done, but I do think there's a there's a point in that where it loses some of that uh personalization that you have as an advisor. I mean, you might be an advisor for a client for the next 20, 30, 40 years, right? They're becoming your client for you. So similarly with your emails, with your letters that you write, um all of that should also be a part of you, and it should definitely not be generic.

What Evie Emma Colin Do

SPEAKER_00 26:15

I love that. Yeah, hyperpersonalization, I think it's super, super important. You hit the nail on the head. I cannot stand it when I receive an email that's clearly been written by AI. It's the worst, man. I I'm on LinkedIn and I'm looking at people and the posts they're putting out, and again, clearly, you know, give away give away some signals of those little M-dashes, you know, you've got the um, you know, the everything's in threes. Yeah, it just seems so perfect. Sure. I'm even getting to the point. Look, I use AI because it's super helpful in helping me speed up my process. But I have to write a lot of content. So when I do a podcast, I go into real detail, right? I'll do the summary, I do, you know, we have a pre-podcast chat. I've got to take that pre-podcast chat, I've got to create a structure so we can control the narrative of the episode to make sure it's interested to the listeners. You know, without AI, I couldn't do that. I then take that, create summaries, show notes, articles. What would have taken me two days now takes me two hours, right? And it's incredible, right? Yeah, incredible. Um, but what's really important for me is I have to build that tone of voice that matches mine. And if I put give it to somebody and I say, let's that sound like it's AI, then they'll say, Well, that bit does, that bit does, and I change it and I put it back into my GPT and I update it. Um so hyper personalization is is is for me. And I do think people are starting to look and see. And if a company is all about using AI, lazy, lazy AI, and it sounds the same as everybody else because you've got this about 90% of posts just sound flipping sane. Yeah, you know, it's awful. Yeah. So I think that is a big, big deal. And I think, especially within financial planning, where you're building into different niches, different tones of voice, um, you want to speak to an audience in a different way. Personality, tone of voice, personalization is key. Now, you've even gone to the point of the AI agents that you've built, right? These amazing AI agents that you put into businesses that save them time, right? You've named them as well. So why don't you just very briefly introduce your AI agents? What are they called? And what do they do? Sure.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh EV Emma, Colin. Yeah. Eeve is for advisors. Essentially, um, it's what we try what we probably find table stakes. It's something that we believe every advice firm should now have. It allows for advisors to uh record, transcribe meetings, create meeting notes, understand the vulnerabilities of a client. If there were any vulnerabilities, uh, what are the next steps from that conversation, as well as figuring out what are the points that should have been discussed, but perhaps was not discussed, uh, and populating a CRM, all things that Eevee can do. Uh Emma's more for support staff to help with things like should be letters and review letters, LOA packs, uh, also named after my first paraplanner. Right. Um Emma, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny enough. She's made it. Yeah, funnily enough. Um, so she she's still um working for an advice firm at the moment. I go, Emma, when are you coming coming around to advise your AI? She'd go, Oh, well, I've got equity in the business, I want to stay on fair enough. But my second paraplanner, I did bring over Brad. And uh, you know, Brad keeps poking and saying, Why is the new agent AI agent not called Brad? Yeah, so I got some stick about that. Oh god. And uh and then there's Colin and Colin's specific compliance, which is far checking and report checking.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

You wait, she'll be chasing you for royalties, but yeah, you have a billion-dollar business.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

It's kind of similar to um if you heard of that story of Nike and the the lady that created that swoosh brand. I not heard that. And um, so the guys over at Nike Field Knight paid her about$20 to create that Swosh night. Right. Swoosh. And about 20 years later, obviously Nike's now a huge company. Yeah. And he came back and said, tell you what, you can have equity and now it's worth about 10 million. She's like, good for her.

Emma Calls Providers For LOAs

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Happy days. I tell you what, you know, I'm just in the middle of my brain's ticking away, right? Wouldn't it be funny if you and I created an like an AI episode, which you can within podcasting, where we actually brought all those three agents onto the podcast and an AI version of me. Yeah, and we can talk to each other.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hilarious.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

Could you love it? Yeah, we could absolutely do that. Oh my god, that's a that's a white laugh. No one's ever done that about. I bet within financial planning, nobody's done that. So can we can we do that, please? We can absolutely do that.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

But you know what's funny about this as well? So we uh one of the things that we tried out with Emma, so uh Emma's got a right personality, right? Because it it needs to actually communicate with the support staff quite a bit. Right. Uh because there's a human in the loop process in that. Right. So it's got a comedic streak to Emma. So one of the things we're doing is one of um you come across this when you're trying to get an LO LOA pack and you have to ring off the providers to ask them where they are with the LOA information, and you end up staying on hold for about 30, 45 minutes, long old time. It's not a fun job to do. But advisors and support staff should do this. So we got Emma to call providers, right? So we so we we caught it for my own. And uh so we ended up calling Scottish widows, and it's on the phone, Scottish widows, and Emma's going, Hey, how's how's your day going? How's everything going? So, oh I'll I'll end up finding that for you. And um, okay, and then the the lady on the other side goes, I'll tell you what, I'm just going through the process now. I'm finding it for you. And as you do while you're waiting, you end up asking a few questions. Oh, how are you doing? Where are you based? Right? How are you doing? Emma did fine. Where are you based? Emma went, Well, I guess I'm not based anywhere. Right? I guess, I guess, uh, I guess I'm just in the sphere. Right. And the lady's going, Pardon, pardon me. And Emma's going, yeah, I guess I'm not based anywhere. And it's this huge existential crisis that Emma's having in this process, right? And uh she's going, Oh my gosh, what's going on? Hang up. And we're going, oh my gosh. And we thought that was hilarious, but we could absolutely do that. Have you got the recording of that?

SPEAKER_00 31:46

We let me check. Find it.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

If I can find it, I'll send it across. Maybe we should put it on it on social media.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

That would be people would love that. Yeah, yeah. Look, that's a classic case of case of hyperclation. And it's it's also a case of where the action, where it's going. You know, is there a point where you can be phoning up and calling companies and chasing documents and you know, saving people time in that respect? Is that something that can actually happen?

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Absolutely. It is absolutely something that happened, uh that can happen. You know, for us it's a case of uh like priorities of what we think could have the biggest impact on an um advising firm's time. We have an incredibly exciting roadmap for what that might look like. Um, we strongly believe Atlas would be a transformation so far. I don't think we've had an AI boom, and that sounds somewhat crazy. I think we're still at the tip of the iceberg and not really recognizing the potential that AI could really have. Um and so Atlas, I believe, will take from you know what I believe what we've got had today is faster horses. We've had AI to speed up what we've always been doing to essentially create a car, something that's completely different, but it ends up getting us to A to B in a completely different fashion than we've ever had before. Um and I believe and I believe the car is just around the corner. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

So I think with Atlas, is there a wait list or anything? Is there anything that people can do to sign up for? Is it out yet? Just just where where are we in the process with that just so people can because I can imagine after this, a few people are going to want to know a little bit more about Atlas.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Um, how can they find out?

SPEAKER_02 33:15

Sure. So um we we have our kind of beta's clients that are kind of utilizing at the moment, and we do have a wait list if you want to be in the next stage of beta. We have about 250 firms um and increasing on a day-by-day basis who have kind of signed up for uh on the wait list, anyhow. Uh and and we're and we're picking them as we go along. Um, who's best suited to go ahead and test, give us feedback as to what that might look like. Uh, but yeah, if you want to sign up, we have we've got a wait list on our website.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

One more question about hyper-personalization because I actually love this from marketing background, podcasting background. For me, I like to see people and I like to hear people. We touched on the fact that we could create an audio broadcast, you know, not going to be great, we're gonna have fun. What about the actual seeing it? Do you ever visualize what Evie looks like or what Colin looks like? And um, do you foresee that in the future that I can actually say talk to an avatar of Emma? Is that something that you think is going to happen? I know that there's like um symposium or something, isn't it? What's the one that's out there at the moment that actually creates an avatar? That's it, yeah, synthesia. Synthesia. Yeah, but it looks very like a robotic. But I I assume, I assume that you know that's something that I can do. So let's say for example I'm a client, yeah, and and and we'll turn it the other way around, right? I'm a client and I want to find out a little bit about my um, I don't know, it's a document that gets sent to me, right? And I read the document and I can't be asked to read it, or I see it on there and I ask the document the question, could could could could like Emma pop up and say, hey, thanks for asking that question and actually interact with me eye to eye almost like a video call.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

Yep. Um so great question. Uh one of the things that we're working on is as an advisor, what if you never had to go on a laptop? Um what if everything could be done via a phone? What if you could uh have a meeting with a um a client and you just go, hey Emma, just had that meeting with Sam. Could you end up uh drafting up an email summary and then also based on that conversation, end up writing a suitable letter as well? And Emma would essentially go ahead and look at all the different platforms, conduct the research for you, look, look back at you, uh, run that through the power planners and get their review of that process as well, and then get that back to the advisor. Boom. But yes, absolutely, being able to just conversate with an individual and also similar to why advisor is so um impactful in a person's life, because someone that can hold you accountable and challenge you on what you're saying, we're hoping Atlas becomes the same. Yeah. Atlas becomes someone that can challenge you around how you're thinking about things and say, Oh, that sounds really good, but have you also considered this for this specific client based on this bit of information? Yeah, I think that's a different way of almost utilizing AI. Uh, not so much as someone that just ends up doing whatever you say, but actually someone that can challenge you on what you're thinking and perhaps even make you a better version of yourself.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Yeah, you don't even need to tell them, do you? Because it should be transcribing anyway the meeting. So, oh this when you think about it in that respect, right? And you put that into perspective, from sitting down to having a conversation, you could have the documents in front of that person almost instantaneously. Yeah. Yeah, that is crazy. Yeah. When you think about it that way, that's insane.

Proactive AI And Better Data

SPEAKER_02 36:14

And that'd be done. Like um at the moment, platforms are all reactive, right? Which is you have to go to it, say something, and then it'll come back to you. Really, the future of AI, and this is kind of the the bottom end of the iceberg here, is when it's proactive. Um, you're right. What if you never had to say anything? Um, what if it could always come to you? What if you could learn your mannerisms, learn what you end up asking on a day-by-day basis, and then just be proactive, do that. Uh it's an exciting future for what advice will be. And by gosh, like it should not be eight percent of the population have access to advice. Um and I'm hoping that uh there'll be a catalyst that comes comes through in the next couple of years that would completely change this.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

That kind of brings me into the kind of concierge vibe as well. So if you knew the client so well from loads of conversations, their ups, their downs, their personality type, what they love, what they like to eat, where they like to go on holiday, like it kind of almost brings it into that family office type concierge service. So not only are you a financial planner, but you might know that they're going to London because you know, I don't know, it tracks their phone or whatever, yeah, and then starts recommending restaurants to them all, you know, all of a sudden you can go to a full concierge service comes with being so it's like a mini wealth, a mini family office in your pocket, yeah. You know, it's kind of cool. It it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

I mean, if we're really stretching the borders of what could be possible, what if um through open banking we can connect to all of your clients' banks and understand? Well, if an if a client's saying they're going to reduce the expenses, are they really reducing the expenses? Are they could they really be doing more with their money? You know, when you end up having a conversation with an advisor, a client, and a question that an advisor might ask is how much do you normally spend within a month? Um, I mean, if I ask you that now, Sam, would you know? I mean, I wouldn't know. I'd kind of be going like spend a lot.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Well, my wife spends a lot. So if you've got an AI agent that stops my wife from spending my money, that's what I'm into.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

Yeah, she wouldn't be a man. Um, so uh and imagine if we just figure out immediately and you go, well, what about we stop doing this and we did this instead? Because the opportunity of what could come for your life out of stopping that is this. Yeah, we can be much better advisors through better data and more data. Um, so the future looks pretty exciting.

Building With Honest Client Feedback

SPEAKER_00 38:29

What I like about you, Alan, is you're not binary. Um, when you speak to people in tech, it can be quite tricky sometimes, it's quite hard. Um, I think your background within financial planning, you're very personable as well, but you can tell you like a total creative. So having an open uh conversation with you, you're you explore concepts and ideas, you don't shut things down and say it's one way. And and I'm getting that from you. And I can imagine that's how you kind of feed that into your business and how you work with the clients. You listen to a lot the feedback from financial planners, listen to what they've got to say, make improvements.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

Uh all the time. I mean, um we get paid by advisors, right? Oh, yeah, they're your customers, yes, for on. And so um everything we end up building out is specifically for them. I I will say that it's almost like it's challenging, also at times, right? And and I'd be interested to hear your uh opinions on this, Sam, from a creativity perspective, because there's one aspect when you end up conversating with people and you say, Great, how can this be better? Um, we're talking about better in the scope of what we have now, and it's not in the scope of what could be, and in that what could be could be completely different to what we have now. And and we almost found that similar with Atlas. I mean, when we're creating when we had EV, Emma Colin, which are all incredible AI agents, the conversation on what could we do better was always great, what about you know a slight amendment here, what about a slight amendment there? But it was never the conversation about what about completely creating something completely different that supplements EV Emma Colin while also doing everything else for an advice firm. Um and and that area is probably where I get a lot of pushback from from my own team, but I think that's great. Challenges are required. Um, but also it's when not everything is does work out, right? Not every idea that we have at least end up hitting off, and a lot of our beta clients, and we're fortunate enough to have clients who tell us, Alan, that's a rubbish idea, or that's a rubbish build. This is um, we haven't had that with Atlas yet. Yeah. Um yeah, what's your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 40:34

I love it. I love thinking about the future, the opportunities that I can create and the solutions that I can bring. But I've always got to have that foot in the present moment and I'd get and I and I always look for feedback. So in respect to what you're saying, it's you've got to stay close to the clients and you've got to kind of ask for their feedback and their and understand how they use things or want to do things in the day-to-day. Because, like you and I, we could probably get carried away. Dope and mean addiction, we want to just create everything, but it's always about bringing it to the present moment and just seeing very, very quickly does this fix a problem, or can I create a slicker, faster, better process or or marketing in my case for a company? And how quickly can I do it? And does it complement the other things that I'm building? Or am I too far into the future and I should stop, come back, and start building out to fix a problem here and now? Does that make that make sense? And it's a battle constantly, I think, with creativity. But I'm getting better at it. Um do you know when I how I've gotten better at it? Being on my own. So when I had my like recruitment business, there's too many people like giving me like feedback, and often it was negative. Yeah, they were kind of fearful and scared about the vision that I had. Um, and when I pulled away from that and started doing it on my own, and it was only me, you know, I had no one else to turn to apart from the customer, you know. So I had to kind of build my my my my my sounding board, if you like, was the the community. And and they're the best sounding board you could ever have, right? So that that that that part of my marketing is to be hyper-personal, is to be really like building people up and having great conversations with people and sharing who these people actually are. Um and then I learn a lot and I gain a lot and and and my my my my creativity um becomes becomes uh focused and grounded.

SPEAKER_02 42:18

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you you're crazy until you're not, right? And uh I completely agree with the philosophy that I mean we've got a big advocation of creating uh MVPs, minimal viable propositions. Um and uh we end up proposing these to advising firms going, hey, this is what we're planning on building out, this is kind of the way that we think it will work. And uh you're not wrong, it helps incredibly to have clients who are open enough to tell you that it's a rubbish idea.

Colin Brings Compliance Up Front

SPEAKER_00 42:46

I love it. Well, we're gonna look at the actual agents that you that you have, and we're just gonna go into a bit of detail. Now, I received a message actually from a TNC manager, stroke compliance guy, who said, Why don't you ever talk about compliance? And I was like, good point. Yeah. Right. So you've got three AI agents. One of them is compliance. You've been called out, is that I've been called out. I wonder if it's Colin in front of you. Yeah, yeah. Sending me a message. It says Colin. I've looked back on his name's Colin. Anyway, let's start with Colin, right? And there's a good reason, I think, as well, probably to start with Colin. Let's start with compliance. Because one, it's an area that AI hasn't really kind of delved into. I don't hear it that often. So I want to kind of start with that. But I suspect you've probably got your reasons why as well. Uh Colin would be a great place to start in respect to talking about the AI agents.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

Sure. So um, I mean, compliance is a backbone of the financial industry, uh, so it's incredibly important. I see why other firms haven't gone around to this area. What we've done is we've created a combination, which is algorithm and generative AI. Right. So um compliance up until date has almost always been algorithms, and essentially algorithms is um, you know, it's zeros and ones. If you end up doing this, then that ends up being the output. Generative AI. AI has more of a personality, it can change. It's an opinion based on the information that's been provided. And so what we did was uh we combined the we combined the two. So that way you end up having something that is uh categorically correct around zeros and ones, and the second, which is it can have an opinion as to what you should do in that situation based on the context. So, what is the thing that compliant uh Colin currently does? Um there's two forms, which is file checking, report checking, checking all the files that you utilize to create a report, checking the report and cross-referencing that against all the other information. Uh one of the most vital things that we're working on now, which has not been worked on in the past, that I'm somewhat surprised by, and I think it should be. Compliance is always something that happens right at the end. Or typically happens right at the end. It's advisor has that meeting with the client, gets information, that information is given to support staff, ends up writing out reporting, whatever that process might be, then it goes to compliance before being sent out to client. But what if compliance is right there, right at the beginning? Um, so that way the whole process becomes significantly more efficient. Um, what if the advisor had the meeting with the client and Colin is there at that meeting with Evie and saying afterwards, hey, by the way, awesome meeting, you've done all the things that you meant to do, but there's just two things that we're still remaining that we've got to get information for just to ensure this whole process goes through with what you're looking for. How good would that be, right? Um, and so that's currently in the uh what Colin's looking to do.

SPEAKER_00 45:43

It's like having the compliance manager sat in your meeting.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Yeah, completely. And and imagine this every throughout every step of the process with Eevee, with Emma when you're writing up reports, but also every time you're speaking with Atlas, what if Colin's always overlooking everything that you're doing, as it should do, being the backbone of what we do?

SPEAKER_00 45:59

Yeah, I love that. Oversight isn't there, proper oversight. That's amazing. Does that support the existing uh compliance team, or does that replace the existing compliance team?

SPEAKER_02 46:09

Sure. Yeah, yeah. It's it's a great question. Um, with all of this, Evie, Emma, and Colin and Atlas, um, the conversation comes up a lot. Will it go ahead and replace our people? I'll slightly change that and go, it's not human replacement, it's task replacement. And I think that's an important distinction. It is specific tasks that are challenging to do or very monotonous to do. Um, if you put a list of things of what those individuals love to do and don't love to do, I think you'd find the vast majority of things that we're currently helping automate are in the don't love category. Um so I think it's more task replacing, but on the on the specific point in Colin, we found on average with firms that we work with, they end up file checking 15% of all their cases, meaning there's an 85% risk that they're taking on all the other cases that haven't been file checked. Um wow. Huge. That is huge. And uh it's just because people don't have the ability, like you'd have to spend an enormous sum of money to go ahead and do 100% file checking every single time. But with Colin, what happens is it allows you to check every single case every single time. Um, and essentially what that enables for compliance managers to do thereafter is then go, great, I know, because Colin can tell me which are high alerts, uh, which have passed and which haven't, and then a compliance manager can go ahead and review from there, as opposed to reviewing 15%, but knowing that there's an 85% risk.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Huge amount of FCA scrutiny, uh pressure on firms, and also rising PI costs. Yes. Does that eventually replace does that eventually remove the need for remove the need for PI, I guess. But should surely it would reduce the risk then.

SPEAKER_02 47:57

Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, that's our that's our hypothesis. I mean, it's a huge reduction of risk. Because anytime there's a uh a high alert, bang, you know about it as a compliance officer. So you know of it immediately. So when you get uh when you get say the compliance knocking on your door, and I know, sorry, rather FCA knocking on your door, I know one of the questions they had was how many of your clients are females as opposed to men? Uh that's something that you can just ask that list and do you get an answer immediately? Uh but if this was a if this was skewed in one way or the other, you would already know this beforehand via Colin. And it's almost that proactive piece that Colin can provide, that alerts before the FCA end up coming, and in which case you have to be reactive. That's going to be incredibly helpful.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

It just goes back to as well the um the capacity to be able to service more clients. Yep. Yeah, which it goes back to what it's about, isn't it? It's about giving the financial advice business the ability uh to free up time, the capacity to take on more of those clients, that market share that's out there that no one seems to be servicing that we talked about earlier. That 16 million, was it, or 19 million? 19 million, yeah. 19 million of people with a hundredk or plus 100k plus. So now we're starting to see it, aren't we? Now we're starting to understand it. But we're also starting to see the power of Atlas and how Atlas would save more time. So we see what I'm seeing with advisory AI is just at the forefront of your mission is to save time, man. It's to free people up to be able to deliver the most amazing service for clients. And who wins in the end? The client, right? This is client vision, which is client-centric.

SPEAKER_02 49:21

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've got one tagline well within advisory AI, which is advice for everyone. So that's like the one tagline that we have continuously going for us: advice for everyone. How can we enable advisors to do more, advice for them to do more, so that we get advice for everyone? Um, you know, like what is it in the US, 50% of uh the population over the US have access to financial advice, and yet in the UK it's only 8%. Now there's also a greater level of scrutiny on the advice that's been given in the UK compared to the US. But nevertheless, um we strongly believe that vision is achievable. What if everyone had access to advice?

Emma Speeds Up Paraplanning

SPEAKER_00 49:58

Yeah, well, it's uh it's it, yeah, I love it. You're fixing a problem, right? And the amount of financial well-being, the positive impact that would have on the society as a whole, regardless of your net worth, yeah, right, is is incredibly powerful stuff. I like having a big shining North Star. With Financial Plan of Life, when I started it, it was to it was to reduce the ice the advice gap by attracting new people into the profession. You know, people's stories were were a window in. I create a window into a profession that lacked advisors, and my job was to share stories of brilliant people that work within the profession and the amazing stuff they're actually doing and the impact they have beyond this perception and idea that it's a middle-aged man who you know just mugs around with some spreadsheets and you know invests your money for you. There's way more positive impact on that. And and this is what I like, it's a positive impact business. Um and I think sometimes we don't we don't go deep enough to to to understand the level of positive impact that that can actually have. I myself have suffered from uh anxiety that was connected to financials, you know, and I feel like having access to something quick, easy, accessible, where I didn't feel it was elitist would have helped me a hell of a lot sooner. Absolutely. So I think I think it's really, really good and I like that a lot. Now I'm gonna move on to power planning because that's a big part of it, and you've got an AI agent that deals with that, and her name is Emma, after Emma, who was your first power planner. So tell us a little bit about that. So we've moved on from compliance. Colin, yeah. Cheers, Colin, see you later, mate. Over to Emma. What's next?

SPEAKER_02 51:28

Sure. So Emma's for the power planning support side of things. So Emma does three things, which is suitable letters and review letters and LOA packs. Um, I'll go through each one, but pseudobid letters and review letters, the probably most impactful thing that Emma can provide is be hyper-personalized to your own templates, your format, your structure, your tone of voice, exactly how you want it to come across in your own formatting, in your own company vision. Uh, and it can be uh super specific to that. And one of the areas that firms have found most helpful with Emma is there's a human in the loop process. And what does that mean? What you can do from your side is you essentially have to review so many different documents, whether that's a provider pack, uh CRM, uh meeting notes, whatever else that might, illustration, all of these different documents you've got to review. What you can do with Emma is simply upload all of them in one go, whether it's a scanned document, handwritten document, or whatever else, PDF or Excel. And what Emma would do is read through all of that, consolidate all that information, go, hey, uh what do you what do you think about me writing this for the introduction? Oh, this is my thoughts around risk. Essentially giving an insight into Emma's brain before Emma writes the entire report. So as a paraplanner, all you can do is go, you're almost working with a colleague. You're going, great, the colleague's done a tremendous amount of work for me in terms of reviewing all of the documents, giving me some things to work with. You go, oh, I'd actually suggest this instead, Emma. Oh, this is what I suggest in this area. And then bang, you all you need to go is click next from that, and you get the output um ready for you in your own format and template. Uh, the cool part about this is the citations throughout. So key one that we always get is well, how do I know it's accurate? Well, you can see where Emma's getting specific data points from where which document, which page, and what line. So you can see that exactly. The LOA pack is you can upload all of the information, all of the packs of data that you get from uh providers onto Emma, Emma can review all of that and give you all the specific questions that you want answers for. This is also where we try to get Emma to call providers as well. Uh, not out yet, but uh we're still working on that.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

Relative to that. Um, when we go back to the hyper personalization bit, if I was a business owner and I had a hundred financial planners in the business, um load of power planners, I might be a bit nervous about this idea of being able to personalize each and every single um report that gets sent out, or you know, or whatever it might well be. Do you advocate individual advisor tone of voice or business tone of voice?

SPEAKER_02 54:02

Sure. Great question. I mean, uh this largely varies on the structure of how the advice firm is set up. Um if the advice firm has a singular vision around how they want to come across their clients, that's worked really well in the past, and that's essentially their brand personality, then you know we can make it so that Emma works off the back of that for everyone. And that's what the vast majority of the firms that we work with do. Comparatively, we also work with firms who are uh you know, say larger networks who are pretty open to allowing for their uh advice firms that are within that network to have their own personality, in which case we can also do that because each of them have a specific twist that they want to make on that brand that they work with. So we can do both in terms of my own opinion. I'd say the former works incredibly well. To have a to have the entire firm singing from the same hymn sheet allows for a level of consensus, consistency that allows for everyone to compound over time, which I think is very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 55:03

Any real-world stats or information, perhaps from your white paper, research that you've done where Emma's been a superstar?

SPEAKER_02 55:11

You know, um there's like a series of cases that comes up. I one of the ones that we probably found most impactful is when all of the AI agents ended up working together, people like Evie, Emma, Colin, working in all the separate departments, coming together and allowing for the whole firm as a as a whole to win. So one being uh Lyft Financial, where they were able to double their uh the amount of clients that each advisor was looking after from 100 to 200 clients per advisor in the span of a year of working with us, which is huge. It's a it's a hundred percent increase in capacity, uh, which they hadn't done before. And we thought, wow, you know, we we we we believe in this vision, but being able to get stats like that is almost a confirmation of the fact that it's achievable, and we're only at the very early stages. I mean, who knows where we could be in a year from now with uh you know Atlas, Eevee, Emma, Colin only getting better.

The Evidence Behind 3x Valuation

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Love it. Before we move on to Eevee, I think a really interesting point with what you you just said, and um, it comes back to what you were saying earlier about a valuation of a business going up when you're using advisory AI. I think you mentioned three times. Yeah, yeah. I think we're at a good point. Let's give, you know, before we move into Eevee and talk about the powerful impact that Eevee has, sure, right? Tell us a little bit about that valuation side in numbers, like real numbers. How is advisory AI increasing the valuation of a business? Yeah, what where are you getting to that three times?

SPEAKER_02 56:37

Sure. We um we were shocked by this. And we're gonna continue doing this. I mean, we're super transparent around the research, uh, how we're thinking about doing this. We're we want to go into this like scientists. Uh it's not it's not good enough for us to say advisors coming out and saying it's time saving. What is the outcome of that time saving? And so we've gone out and said, we work with third parties like Jigsaw Tree and the Flower Group. And uh these third-party consultants, we essentially gave access to our client base and we said, great, let's have that conversation. Let's see how uh utilizing AI agents from Advisory AI can go ahead and change a business's evaluation. What we did was use two case studies, A and B. And case study A was a firm which had three advisors, I believe top of mine, two support staff and a compliance officer. So six people in total. We got a replicate group within uh advisory AI client base who's got exactly the same, but using our AI agents. And we tracked them. What did that look like from where they were a year ago, two years ago, uh from the day in which they started using advisory AI to where they are now? We looked at the cost of operations, we looked at what um the increases in revenue, uh, the capacity uh challenges, and the amount of people that they ended up employing and not having to continue employ. Um, and reviewed them again uh 12 months later after utilizing advisory AI. And when going through the Bid DAM multiples, uh utilizing the same for both ends, we found there's a 3x multiple on the firm that was utilizing the AI agents via advisory AI to those who weren't. Right. Um and we thought that was fascinating, and largely it came from uh efficiency because advisors were able to do more with the time, but secondly, it was a cost. Um, advisors were able to do more, so there's more clients, but they didn't continue going ahead and hiring more people to go go about doing that. And we thought that was fascinating, which solves a problem.

SPEAKER_00 58:37

Didn't think like people in there, so companies want to be able to grow, there's a big old bottleneck, right? You can't speed up the amount of people that come into the profession. Um, but you can certainly speed up the ability and the capacity to service clients if you're using AI agents such as Emma, EV and Colum, right?

SPEAKER_02 58:52

Absolutely. I mean, um it shocked us. We we weren't expecting 3x, we we would have been happy with 1.5x.

Evie Cuts Advisor Admin Time

SPEAKER_00 58:58

Um but yeah, it's pretty love the fact you've done the research as well. And again, you know, if if you're listening to this and you want to know that research, you can download the white paper from the show notes, right? Or just head over to advisory AI website and take a look and then book a demo. But let's get into this Eevee then, right? Because we're ending on the advisors, sorry, advisors, we've got you at the bottom of the bottom of the run today. So tell us a little bit about Eevee and how Eevee support and advisors then.

SPEAKER_02 59:19

Gotcha. Well, Evie's uh advisors' best friends, right? I I believe Haley Mills from Foston Nova recently gave me a shout out on LinkedIn. I think that's it. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:30

I was talking about it, and she was literally saying it like she was his best friend.

SPEAKER_02 59:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is love it. So I love that. Thanks a lot, Haley. Uh so uh what can Eevee end up doing? So Eevee can go ahead and create things such as uh record transcribe meetings, create meeting notes, fact finds, email summaries. Uh and the key part around this is it can be completely bespoke to your own tone of voice, format, and what you're looking to get from all of this. And the key point understand whether there's any vulnerabilities that came out of those conversations that you had. Uh fascinating enough. There was a case, I believe, about a week ago or two weeks ago, where one of my clients mentioned this and uh he was saying he spoke to a client, but the client's connection was off. And so the client kept and saying, Say that I can't really hear you. What part of me? And we found on the foot in the meeting thereafter, it said in the vulnerabilities, this client may be hard of hearing because they kept having to repeat that they couldn't understand what you were saying or couldn't hear what you're saying. But that's largely because of the signal, and we thought that was a fascinating way of how Evie thinks. Uh, that's one. And the second that we found Eevee to be really helpful for is populating your CRM. Um, we integrate with a whole series of CRMs now, and off the back of a recording that you've had with a client, what Eevee can do is transcribe that, create a meter note, and say, hey, let me go ahead and populate your entire CRM for you or up to 80 fields so that you don't have to go ahead and sit down and do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

That's phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:03

It's pretty cool, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:04

What other time-saving tasks is it improving? Is there any, again, any we talked about I love the data stuff by the way, and the research that's done. Is there anything else around Eevee where you've you've seen such a huge impact in some of the firms that are using Eevee?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:18

Sure. So uh I believe the industry average is about 60% of your time as an advisor is spent on administrative tasks, and the 40% is actually spent speaking with clients, which is a crazy stat considering as an advisor you go into it because of your love of helping people.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

Yeah, right. It's a feel-good part of the job, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:38

Exactly. Um, from our own case studies and the own research that we've done, we found this to half in the span of the past uh two years, uh, from going from 60 to 30 percent. So our whole uh uh 70% of your time as an advisor is now spent on direct a conversation with clients, either through meetings or indirect through uh conversations via email. We thought this was awesome. The remaining 30%, uh you can hold me against this here, right? Remaining 30% we think will be completely done by Atlas. Wow. So the ambition being we'll have this conversation again in a year's time, and uh I'm hoping I'll be seeing it and saying 100% of an advisor's time would be spent on client and uh immediate like conversation with clients or indirect via email. I love it.

Ten-Year Vision For Advice Access

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

Sounds very, very exciting. So I want to talk about the future. If advisory AI dominates the profession, I think it will. Sounds like it's on the right pathway to doing that, and there's certainly a lot of very positive noise around, and that's where we want the noise, good new, good news to travel fast so people can experience the benefits of advisory AI. But let's say perfect world scenario, advisory AI takes over. What does the future of financial planning look like in the next say 10 years? I know it's massive, but what does it look like?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:59

One thing that always sticks close to mind, right? So we've got an ambition. When we started uh three years ago, it was within five years, we want to get the uh the advising gap from eight percent to twenty five percent. That's been our ambition. So within the next two years, we expect that to go to twenty-five percent. Now uh it's still at eight percent, so we've still got a long way to go, so we've got to do a lot more to end up getting there. Uh within ten years, I do not think it's crazy for us to say that uh 50% of the industry goes ahead and gets access to financial advice. Um, as I was saying earlier, it's an injustice that people don't have access to this. So um I do think the infrastructure of how advice will be given will completely change with the enablement of AI. At the moment, I I I strongly believe we've been using AI to create faster horses. We're still doing the exact same things we were always doing, but the only difference is AI allows us to do it quicker. With this second iceberg, right? Um with the launch of things such as Atlas, which allows for it to be proactive, almost a colleague that can do so much for you, allow for you to only spend time with your clients. I do think that would change how we as advice firms go ahead and give advice. The process of doing advice and the structure of how advice has been given for the past 50 years has completely changed. Now, what that would look like, we're seeing so many changes already that uh I can't put my own finger to it. Um we're seeing so many changes into AI that we find super exciting, but all in all, I think the mission's saying the same of advice for everyone, and that 50% is or will or should be the target for 10 years' time.

Careers After AI And Ice Harvesting

SPEAKER_00 1:04:43

I love it. We are a careers-based podcast within the financial planning profession, so it seems only right that we also talk about the positive impact that this will have on careers within financial planning. So if someone's uh listening in right now and they're trying to learn a little bit about what it's like to be a financial planner, what technology is there, how A is how how AI is going to support them, what encouragement would you give somebody who's maybe starting the career around getting stuck into it and utilising AI and how it's gonna help and improve their job and say replace them and they're not wasting their time on their qualifications? Because I can imagine there's a little bit of a fear around that. It's the same in any any industry or any profession. There's a bit of a fear that AI's gonna take their job. What can you do to just reassure them that perhaps that's not the case and actually it's gonna make your career all that more better?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:30

Yeah, yeah, it's it's a great question. It's an industrial revolution that we're having. Um you come across an occupation called ice harvesting?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:42

Never.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:43

Okay. So in the 1800s, ice harvesting was one of the most popular occupations that you could have in North America. It's essentially when you go over to a frozen lake, you saw off a whole block of ice, and you're delivering this to homes instead of them having fridges back then, they had these big ice blocks that they'd put their uh Put the food in so that it would store for longer. Seems somewhat like archaic, right? It seemed like ancient times. And there was about 80,000 people that was doing ice harvesting in the 1800s. Come to the 1900s, what came out? The fridge. And the entire industry by the 1930s, there was zero ice harvesters because there was almost no need. However, what ice harvesters did hold was a huge expertise in the process of perseverance, uh preserving um ice blocks, or understanding how uh you can go ahead and uh transport cold storage. So uh about 80 to 90 percent of everyone that was ice harvesters, where did they end up going? To the to the uh to the fridge industry. What an incredible story in terms of statistics around how the skill sets that you still have there end up applying to this new area. We we think it's similar now. Uh we don't think things like advice advisors, paraplanners, compliance officers will be replaced far from it, but we do think the roles will change. By the end of the day, companies will still require people who work hard, who learn quickly, and are passionate about their roles. We've we've started seeing this now with our own advising firms. With power planners who are saving a lot of time in report writing, what we found is advisors spend more time meeting the clients, and paraplanners will be the ones that will review all that conversation via the EV notes and write up the recommendation for that specific client. And we're starting to see this happen more and more and more. We think it makes a ton of sense as well. I mean, the technical expertise that paraplanners hold uh and the ability that advisors hold to form a really deep connection with a client allows for everyone to utilize what they love about the job that they initially joined.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:50

I love it. And a more financially fit world.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:53

And hopefully one where everyone ends up. What if you could just do all the things you loved? Um, I think for a long time we've always gone, that's the way it is. We can't really go away from it. I disagree with that statement. Like, why don't we challenge that? And and a lot of advice firms are challenging that right now. Uh if you hate something, why not enable for AI to go ahead and build, you know, enable for AI to go ahead and do that thing that you hate? Yeah. And the big point, and we've talked about this quite a few times in this uh conversation, is one of the areas they really lack on uh AI and it needs from a human is creativity and a vision. And it's just something that doesn't matter. I imagine it's the same for you.

Final Thoughts And Where To Start

SPEAKER_00 1:08:37

Yeah, I think AI, look, I I'm I'm gonna we'll end on my on some thoughts just around just around AI, really, and the impact that we're gonna have on um humanity as a as a whole and society. I I I'm very bullish about AI, I'm very positive about it. I think it will free us up as humans to build deeper connections with each other and spend more time with each other, not on tasks that cause us stress and anxiety, and especially if you're sort of not the nice neurotypical person, you know, like going into something like financial advice, where you were saying earlier that's a huge proportion of your time is spent on tasks that are really difficult, yeah, you know, hard for somebody that thinks the wrong way, but they're incredibly gifted when it comes to human connection. I think what it will do is just elevate us as human beings to be able to build deeper connections, and I think we'll start to become hopefully more understanding of each other and um and spend more time with each other and be more connected. That's my view of it. Not that it's gonna destroy humanity, that it's gonna bring us closer together because we don't have to do the boring shit. Quite right, completely agree. Love it. Well, listen, Alan, love talking to you today. Best conversation I've had on AR. Thanks for having us. Really, really enjoyed it. Um, we wish you all the best. And obviously, if anybody's listened to this, wants to connect with you, do connect with Alan on LinkedIn. He's very vocal and he will connect with you back and he will engage with you. And if you want demo or you want a white paper, check the show notes. Um, and Alan is there to help you. And um, yeah, be sure to let us know what you think about the episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:09

We've got to do uh EVM I call it next. It's happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:12

Yeah, thanks for having him.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:14

Thanks, Dude.