Advisors and AI: What’s Changed, What Hasn’t, and What’s Next with Mat Matthews, Advisor360

AI isn’t coming for advisors’ jobs. It is quietly reshaping what clients expect, how firms differentiate, and where true value lies. The challenge is simple: will you be transparent about the technology supporting your work or let clients fill in the blanks themselves?

In this episode of Visionary Advisor, Alex Kirby (founder of Total Family) sits down with Mat Matthews, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Advisor360, for a candid conversation about the 2026 Connected Wealth Report and the realities of AI in wealth management. Mat brings a product leader’s clarity to what’s actually changing, what’s just noise, and what matters most for client relationships.

The discussion explores why most advisors use AI daily but rarely talk about it with clients and how this silence can create mistrust instead of confidence. Mat and Alex get practical about where AI is delivering value now, why trust still builds slowly, and how firms are scrambling to keep policies current as technology evolves. They also consider how clients’ own use of AI is raising the stakes for transparency and what it means for advisors to move from data wrangling to truly holistic guidance.

For advisors wrestling with rapid change, compliance pressures, and rising client expectations, this episode offers a grounded look at what it means to serve families well in a new era.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• 04:20 How advisor attitudes about AI have shifted from fear to guarded optimism within a year
• 05:30 Leading AI use cases today, including meeting summaries, CRM, and administrative workflows
• 05:57 Current boundaries around what advisors trust AI to handle, versus what stays human
• 09:13 Why developing clear policies around AI is now essential for your firm
• 20:28 The consequences of not proactively discussing AI with clients, and why avoidance is not neutral
• 25:08 How clients’ growing familiarity with AI affects their advisor relationships
• 29:48 What makes human judgment, empathy, and relationship-building irreplaceable
• 30:22 The expanding role of advisors as generalists managing the full picture of a client’s life, not just investments

Notable Quotes from Mat Matthews

“You’ve got this weird scenario where three quarters of the industry is benefiting from this new technology, but they’re barely mentioning it to the people it’s supposed to serve.”

“When advisors avoid the topic (AI), they’re not creating neutrality. They’re creating a vacuum. And the vacuum is going to get filled by the client.”

“Trust is the product in this industry. It’s not a feature. It is the actual service that’s being provided.”

“I think the firms play a big role in being on the forefront in saying, 'Here's how we’re using AI responsibly to provide you with better outcomes, with the guardrails and the safety controls that we know are important.'"

“If your role is just in data aggregation, to me that’s pretty small… The really good advisors are just going to be helping people with advice.”

Resources

• 2026 Connected Wealth Report, Advisor360
• Advisor360
• There’s An AI For That (daily newsletter)
• Total Family
• AI Tools
  • Claude
  • Google Gemini
  • ChatGPT
  • Perplexity
  • Lovable
• Harvard Business Review - The Future Is Shrouded in an AI Fog

Stay Connected with Visionary Advisor
We believe wealth is well-being. Subscribe to the Visionary Advisor Newsletter for practical tools and ideas to serve families across generations.
Explore more at totalfamily.io | Follow us on LinkedIn | Watch episode clips on YouTube

Stay Connected with Visionary Advisor
We believe wealth is well-being. Subscribe to the Visionary Advisor Newsletter for practical tools and ideas to serve families across generations.
Explore more at totalfamily.io | Follow us on LinkedIn |  Watch episode clips on YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

21% said it was a threat to their livelihood. And that's kind of dropped to about 8%. So I think that sentiment shift is largely the fear is kind of burned off. The other flip side of that is it seems like optimism has dipped, right? So we saw like last year 85% seeing AI as a as a help down to like 74% this year. So the bar's been raised. People are using AI kind of in their everyday lives, and they're expecting it to do more and more.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Wealth advisors are optimistic about AI. They're using it. They believe it's making their practice better. And almost none of them are telling their clients. 21% discuss it proactively, 30% avoid it entirely. My guest, Matt Matthews, ran the research that surfaced this gap. The 2026 Connected Wealth Report from Advisor 360. He's their chief product and engineering officer and one of the clearest thinkers I think we found on AI and wealth management and where all of this is headed. Let's welcome Matt to the Visionary Advisor Podcast. Matt Matthews, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Great to be here, Alex. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

You're running product at Advisor 360, and I reached out to you because of the 2026 Connected Wealth Report. You did one in 2025. Was that the first one?

SPEAKER_01 1:22

No, we've done this for a number of years. I'm not actually sure when we started, but yeah, okay. We kind of do one every year.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Um it's a cool report because I think like you can see the evolution of some of this stuff. It seemed to us when we read it that you would have a unique perspective into how advisors are using AI, how AI is sort of collectively impacting the role. And we'll include the link to the report below, but maybe just tell us, you know, as someone who's running product, what jumped out to you as the most surprising thing in the the 2026 report?

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, it was wasn't actually like a single number. It was uh there was kind of this contradiction between two numbers. So that's what surprised me most. Like 74% of advisors say AI is already helping their practice, and that's up from about 64%, like two years ago when we did the report. But at the same time, 21% are like proactively talking about it with their clients, right? So you've got like this weird uh scenario where like three-quarters of the industry is benefiting from this new technology, but they're barely mentioning it to the the people it's supposed to serve, right? So that that kind of gap was probably the most surprising for me.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Do you think that that would be true in most industries? And I know we're here talking about wealth, but do you think these numbers are consistent across you know in most major industries?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

I have the same question. I think, you know, I think of like how I use AI, and I think we went through this period of like, you know, you were secretly using it and you didn't want to tell anyone you're using it, but that's kind of quickly graduated to, okay, yes, of course, I'm not, you know, writing this all myself. I'm leveraging AI. So I I don't know how much that's true more broadly, but I I think it is there's some cultural sensitivity that's kind of got to work through the system.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Yeah, it would almost be like if you just replaced it with the word internet. Like I used internet to help research this report. It did feel like a while like you had to say it. Yes, that's right. And then it disappeared. You don't everyone sort of just especially, you know, even like the outline I sent you for this document is way better than any outlines I was doing. You know, the outlines just keep getting better. And and to me, it's it's clearly someone's using AI. I I don't, I just sort of assume people are using AI.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Yeah, to you to your point, I think, you know, I don't know, 20 years ago you'd walk into a doctor's office with a symptom and they're like, what you thought it was, and they'd be like, oh, did you find that on the internet? And uh now they kind of expect people to be self-educated about things, and that's the starting point of which they can say, well, here's what the data says, or here's what you know, the evidence says. So uh yeah, totally, totally like that.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

What was the the sentiment shift from last year to this year? And I I I think you and I were trying to do a podcast here that wasn't going to be irrelevant in like 90 days, and I know it's really hard with how fast this stuff is moving, but what do you feel like the general sentiment shift was?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

The data says last year it was like a really big, you know, almost binary, like, you know, 21% said it was a threat to their livelihood, and that's kind of dropped to about 8%. So I think that sentiment shift is largely the fear is kind of burned off, right? And I think that's the kind of the biggest shift that we saw. And the other flip side of that is it seems optimism has dipped, right? So we saw like last year it was 85% seeing AI as a as a help down to like 74% this year. So the bar's been raised. People are using AI kind of in their everyday lives, and they they they're expecting it to do more and more. So we think that trust increased? I think that's still uh really building, right? So there's this kind of evolution of trust. One of the analogies we use is like, you know, you hire uh a new assistant. I mean you're not gonna like put them in front of your biggest client like on day one, right? You're gonna say, like, do some background tasks, do you help me with this, kind of see how you get your legs working and then graduate up. I think that's kind of the evolution. So we still people saying, okay, do these things, summarize my meeting notes, input data into my CRM, things that are reversible. Like they're not gonna create long-term lasting damage and then build up that trust from there.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah, it's more behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Yes, more behind the scenes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

And in your report, you have the the use cases, the top use cases are meeting summaries, CRM updates, meeting prep, client communications, all administrative.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

How quickly is that shifting? Are they underutilizing these AI tools? Like were you when you saw that, were you disappointed that they weren't using it for more things?

SPEAKER_01 5:57

I think it's uh just a statement of reality. That's where the trust boundary is today. Every time we talk about technology and these, you're like we, you know, the roboadvisor discussion, you know, whatever 20 years ago. It's there's this fear of this unchecked thing that's gonna go trade your accounts and go rogue, right? So I think that's really where that trust boundary is still sitting today. It's like where there's consequences, things that are hard to reverse. Only 8% in our report said that they would let AI rebalance a portfolio or execute trades without review. I'm actually surprised it's that high. Right. So anytime there's client assets, fiduciary obligations, any of that kind of stuff, the you know, the advisor really wants to be in the loop and kind of control that. So no, I I wasn't really surprised. I think it's it's playing out the way it needs to, and and building trust takes time.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

A couple of these stats I want to jump into. Uh a year ago, 21% of advisors saw AI as a threat to their livelihood. Today it's 8%. Yep. I could have seen that going the other way too, because the tools are getting so much better. What do you think is the reason there?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah, and I actually have the same thought because, you know, you see, especially in the popular media, there's increasing fears about AI in the kind of the general population as well. I actually think it comes back to, you know, advisors are getting a better sense of what really drives their worth and their value. And it is those human interactions. We talk about trust, empathy. I think it becomes clearer for them like why they are valuable. And their job is not just a, you know, a bunch of administrative tasks or even uh investment management overall. It's it's uh it really is kind of creating that connection with with a person. And I think that's just my take on it. We don't have the data to say this. My take on that is that that's been a little bit clearer for people.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah. Well, I mean, some of the stuff that they're using it for, it's just that the AI is clearly better at doing something like, you know, I've been I've been hearing advisors sort of complain about CRM updates or maybe salespeople in general since it was created. Yes. And now the thought that I can have an interaction with Matt Matthews, it can update your contact information, log our call. To me, those things are AI is just clearly better at. Yes. But then sitting down with you is a whole different thing. Right. Maybe it is a little bit more of that, and less fear as they're seeing both like the capabilities grow, but the limitations of it too.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, in in my daily life, so I've set up Claude. Every day it goes into my uh we use Google Meet, so it it looks for the recordings that of all the meetings I had and all the transcriptions, and it kind of pulls out some of the key aspects, summarizes them for me, creates uh to-dos and stuff. So I'm not sitting in these meetings like taking notes anymore. Right. And like, you know, worried about did I miss something? I'm engaged, I'm present, and have this feeling of trust that, hey, you know, those details are going to be captured. And if I need to go back and reference them, they're they're there. That's my to-do list is up to date. So I think that's uh it gives people a lot of more ability to be present with their clients.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Yeah. I don't have the the 2024 or like earlier versions of the report, but it saw it was formal AI policies in just a year, went from 47% to 82%. If we go back a couple of years, it's probably like less than 10 or or even lower than that. You know, when we were negotiating a an MSA with a large financial institution recently, it was one of the first times we had seen these AI policy provisions in here. Like, how are you using AI? What is happening with the data that's getting fed into AI or using it to train? You know, that wasn't in MSAs 24 months ago. And so all of this is happening. And then the other thing that I feel like the report tells a good story about is the share of the advisors calling their firms cutting edge drops from 35% to 28%, and 66% up from 50 now say their firms' techniques need improving. Yeah. What do you think that is about?

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Yeah, I mean, I I think the the bar is raising. Uh people have again, people are using these technologies in their personal lives or in their non-professional basis, and they're they're realizing there's a lag between what they can do in a controlled environment and what they can do on their own, right? So I I think that's uh I think that's pretty important, right? Because uh we know that advisors have choices and and they kind of look at like, do I want to stay with this firm or is there a more tech-enabled firm that I can that I can go to and better leverage that some of this technology? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Where do you get your AI information? How do you stay up to date on the changes that are happening in in AI? Me personally? Yeah, you just uh you personally as a product leader.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

It's really hard because there's so much going on right now, and it's it feels like every day there's a not just more information, but real shifts in like trajectory um happening. So personally, I've kind of found places like X and stuff are actually pretty good places to see the more recent things that are happening. I follow a lot of people that use the technology very effectively, and you kind of see where things are going. You can see the latest announcements and things like that. There's a bunch of news. Like I get this uh daily newsletter. I don't know if it's daily, but it shows a mainbox a lot, which is it's it literally is is titled There's an AI for that. And it and it like every day it's got like 10 new AI applications that that somebody's built or that does something interesting. So it gives me a lot of like motivation to like, oh, like those are interesting use cases or applications for for the technology. Can we think about doing some some of those things?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

That's great. I have a newsletter that I like. Axe definitely has a ton of stuff, YouTube has a lot of good stuff. Yes. I've heard this from multiple people, but you know, you talk about some maybe a workflow you built, it pulls from Google Meet and it populates your CRM and all this stuff. And I I feel like I do those sometimes, and then I'm on X or whatever, just trying to learn and see what's happening, and then you realize that you're doing it not in the best way.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

And then you have to go back and rethink what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

And then someone's writing an article about, oh, the way that you're doing it is actually entirely wrong. And then you, you know, you read that. I heard a term from I think it was from a Harvard Business Review article called AI fog, where like that, if you look out, it's just very hard to see what is going to happen in 18 months or three years. Do you have just you personally, do you have any of that? It's not quite anxiety, but it's this sort of rapid evolution of these tools that I feel like my human, my little tiny human brain cannot grasp all the stuff that's happening. And if I don't look at X for like two days and I'm like, oh my God, there was an update to Claude or Perplexity or or whatever. Do you have any of that feeling? Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

And I actually there was another Harvard study they talked about. Um, maybe it was the same one, AI fog, but it was like this as we use these tools more, we're kind of trying to keep up with a machine that's just a lot faster though, than this tiring, right? It's like really tiring. So that there's that aspect of it too. Like you can do 10 times more, 100 times more, but you still feel really exhausted because you're like, you know, now think you can do that through for an eight-hour day. And so there's that aspect. There's the aspect of, yeah, every every day some some new announcement or something changes, and you know, you're you're definitely kind of always not you're very far from the leading edge on stuff. I'm not that concerned about that. I think we have guys here that uh or people here that that actually do a lot of really interesting things. And so I learned a lot from them. But you know, one of our engineers spent like the weekend building his own like open clause setup and like remote controls and things like that. And then like that Monday, I think Claude announced uh all those features were built in. Just like I'm not that worried about being like on the bleeding edge of things. I think just kind of uh knowing where what people are doing. I think in a year from now it's gonna be completely different. So there's also merit in keeping up and not like you know being on the bleeding edge.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yeah, it seems like there the decisions are both what tools am I using, and then the tools keep kind of it's like this race on these frontier models, right? And and the larger companies, you know, our CTO said to me, I think a couple of weeks ago, he's like, I don't know if we need GPT anymore because we're using Claude and we're using Perplexity and all these various tools. And now you have all these connectors and you're building your own markdown files and knowledge base and all this kind of stuff. And I just said to him, if you would have said that to us eight months ago, we wouldn't have believed it. Do you have any recommendations or do you have any sort of thoughts on like firms sort of committing to Claude and saying this is the one we're gonna ride with, or committing to to one of these certain companies, or staying nimble? Like it have you seen any sort of approaches to that that you've liked?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Not more broadly, but what we what we did early on is you know, we we just went really wide and we told people use whatever you want to use, we'll pay for it. Right. And so people were using, you know, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, people are using specialized tools like Lovable and what's that one? Basically, kind of a code, uh, a coding tool with uh very nice aesthetic capability so you can kind of easily mock up a product or or a website or something like that. It's it's pretty fun. About a year ago, we had people using all kinds of different things. Um, we have kind of started to narrow that um mostly because yeah, there is some setup uh required. So if you start to get good at like Claude and build your Skills MD files and your Cloud MD files and kind of set up that infrastructure, it starts to become sticky. Um, so we've kind of started to narrow down the field and knowing that the Frontier Labs are they're they are leapfrogging each other. So, you know, OpenAI might have an advantage for a month or a week or something, but then new model comes out from Claude and all of a sudden they're in a lead. So so having always the the the latest and greatest best model isn't isn't always that important.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

One of the things that I'm struggling with as a founder and CEO is the token usage because half of my, you know, half of my brain says, don't worry about it. Yeah. We're experimenting. This is just price of learning. We gotta we have to give everyone the tools and let them go try and do things and build their dashboards and all that stuff. And then the other half of it is just this is insane that you know, like you're giving everyone has kind of like no guidance and no reason to be efficient either on their their token usage. And I've heard a lot of leaders kind of trying to figure this out. Do you have thoughts on token usage or how you you guys are doing it at Advisor 360?

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah, it's it's funny you mentioned that. Like I sent an email to my entire team a couple weeks ago and we got a pretty strong reaction from it. But it was the the concept was more for more, right? We're in that phase where we're not looking to optimize. We're looking to see how this could potentially, like if we spend more, can we get more? And and the example I used was every company I've been at for my entire career, it's always the same, like, hey, we've got way too much to do and not enough people to do it, right? And so now you have this like weird opportunity where you can potentially spawn off your own team and and like compress a backlog of two years down to you know a quarter. And so I want to see that if that's possible. If that's not possible, then then you have to have the the the second discussion, which is okay, we're gonna we're gonna spend less to get more, right? Um, and and no one wants to have that discussion, right? Um, that's uh so it's really kind of incumbent on us to figure out can we actually spend more to get more, increase output, increase features or uh product development capabilities, right? Um that's that's the current uh phase that we're in.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

So and you said when there's a strong reaction to what was the reaction from the team?

SPEAKER_01 18:24

They were on the same page with you, or a lot of people were, and they were like, I like a lot of like I love that email, I've been doing this and this, and like I really want to feel that encouragement. There's a lot of trepidation, like okay, you're you're opening up the door, and now we're telling people to to run really fast, and other people are, you know, might run faster than me, and like, you know, now I gotta get on this race. Uh so I think there was some trepidation about that. And then and then there's people saying, What are you doing? You're unleashing a cost fiasco here. We do have controls on our cost, so we we can put we we switch from the um clawed, you know, paper seat version to the the metered usage. Yeah. We get charged on API usage, but you can still they have like a really good set of controls on that. So we can we can kind of still build some level predictability into it until we see you know where where these things kind of actually head out.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

It's a bizarre time right now, uh, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

It really is. I'm I'm in the same boat. I'm I'm pushing everyone to go faster. Yep. I'm doing that for a little while, and then I have like a check in my brain, I'm like, then I have to like go to them and say, I understand I'm pushing you really fast. So please bear with me and it's okay, but keep going. Right. You know, but it's really at a crazy speed. I mean, I think if you asked, if you or I sat down with our teams, like, or if we've if we went back two years and then looked at what our teams are doing right now, we definitely would be happy. Yes. Right? You'd be like, I can't believe we've done all this stuff, but at the same time, you're also looking forward and saying, it's not enough. It's very hard.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yes, it is. Yeah.

unknown 19:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

I think there will be an equilibrium. We're not there yet. Like the the again, right? Uh when every day there's a there's a new surprise in in the technology landscape, we're we're definitely not at at an equilibrium where people understand here's what this looks like, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Okay, well, let's let's shift to trust because I I I thought there was some cool stuff in the in the study that the two stats that jumped out to me 21% of advisors proactively discuss AI use with clients, and then 30% avoid the topic entirely. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Yeah, I think you know, when advisors avoid the topic, they're not creating neutrality. They're they're creating a vacuum, right? And the the vacuum is gonna get filled by the client. They're gonna have their own assumptions and things like that. So it's actually a little bit concerning to see that people are avoiding having that topic. So there's valid reasons for that, right? I mean, 31% of consumers said they're comfortable sharing all their financial data with AI, and that's not, you know, that means whatever, 70% or not, right? Um, I think that means the majority have concerns. If those concerns do never get addressed by the person they trust more, their advisor, like I think they're just gonna fester, right? So we don't think it's really the right approach to just kind of ignore it. You don't want your client saying, Is my advisor using AI on my accounts? Are they being transparent with me? Should I be worried? Right. You don't want them to have that internal conversation. We think it's better to kind of address it, proactively flip the dynamic, and basically say, look, I'm not hiding this. I'm in control of this. I'm using this, like you said, like I would just like I would use the internet. I'm using this to kind of give you better outcomes, but give you kind of, you know, stress test your scenarios better, whatever it is. That should be kind of how they they they approach the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Honesty is the best policy.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yes, exactly. Right. And we did that uh here at our firm. We, you know, we we noticed that people were using AI, just trying to hide it, take out, you know, format it, blah, blah, blah. So we as leaders, we just started saying, look, we're not gonna hide it. We're gonna actually like, you know, say, I did this with ChatGBT. Um it's like, here's the raw output, like uh in all its like glory. I'm not hiding it. And that kind of uh Help people feel more comfortable.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yeah. I think there's like the lying where the client's like, Did you use AI to help prepare for this meeting? You're like, no, this is I just totally got really good at formatting and presentations in the last you know, three weeks or whatever. So I think that's a definite no. Yeah. In terms of you know, being proactive about it, I think if my advisor, you're just gonna assume that they're they're being responsible.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Right. I I think that's a safe assumption. Like you've built up trust with these clients. They don't think that you're putting in their personal information into GPT and just like sending it out into the ether. But to me, I I think I would like if my advisor was using these tools. It would, it would make me feel like they were going on this journey of growth. It's gonna make them better, it's gonna make their firm better. It's I don't really view it as a negative. I like the idea of my advisor using it. You buy that?

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Yeah, I do. And I think the firms have a role to play here, right? Um, because you you don't want to think that your advisors taking your public data and going on to chatgpt.com and like cutting and pasting things into there. Like you want to know that the firm has a set of guardrails and policies and a capability to kind of protect your data. So I think that's really what advisors should be asking of their firms is like, you know, ultimately trust is the product in this industry, right? It's not a feature. Um, it is the is actual service that's being provided. So I think the firms play a big role in in like it being on the forefront and saying, here's how we're using AI responsibly to provide you with better outcomes with the guardrails and the safety controls that we know are important.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yeah. I I think there's an opportunity for firms to lean into this from an innovation standpoint. Yep. You know, frame it as innovation.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Answer questions. You know, we've seen advisors include in their presentations like, hey, we're using Claude for these things. Correct. The organizationally, we're using it for this on an advisor-by-advisor basis. We're using it to like summarize notes, to build presentations, and just put it out there in a way that it the messaging is clear and get it on the table. To me, those are really great ways to approach it. Have you heard any other sort of best practices as far as advisors who maybe want to be proactive about mentioning the fact that they're using AI or their firm is using AI, but they're not sure how?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah, I mean, I think they're their firm or if they're you know, solo practice, they should, they should have a very clear public statement on what they're doing with it, how they're doing it. We do this for our business as well. Like, you know, we're not gonna train on your data. Or we're gonna, if we use public providers, we make sure they're not gonna train on on your data. You know, those kind of very, very basic AI hygiene policies, I think, are for sure kind of again. If you're at a firm, you should be definitely asking your your firm, like, hey, uh, what's a clear story that we can talk to customers about? And that if you're a smaller firm, you might want to go develop those on your own.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Right. Yeah, the the evolution of it all is, you know, where I want to go to next. And I was talking to a leader who said that they had a client bring their AI to their meeting and just take out their phone and said, Hey, I just I'm gonna record our meeting so that I have notes and records of it and blah, blah, blah. Are you okay with that? And I don't know the right answer. Yeah. But I do think firms are gonna have to get ready and advisors are gonna have to get ready to answer that question because all of us might have these little sidekicks with us. Now, some people might be like doing it on their phone, some people might be wearing glasses or earbuds, or you know, who who really knows? But I I feel like both the advisors bringing these tools to the table and the clients bringing these tools to the table are just some of these like fire drill questions we're gonna have to start asking. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

And that, you know, but I I think there's a again, everyone's kind of in the same boat. So the your clients aren't like immune to this technology. They're seeing it, they're using it in their work. I called my plumber a couple of weeks ago. It's a small mom and pop shop and talking to Susan, the owner for, I don't know, since I've owned my house like the last 15 years, and uh I had a question about our water heater. Um, and I called and they had installed a new service. I was talking to an AI for probably about a minute uh before I realized it was an AI. And I first got kind of annoyed, and then I was like, it was like, you know, ask me your question. And so I did. I said, you know, it was a question about does my tankless water heater need servicing? Blah, blah, blah. And it was like, okay, you know, according to our records, you have this model, it looks like it hasn't been serviced, and it uh we do recommend this. And I was like, oh, perfect. Do you want to help? Do you want to schedule that? I'm like, yeah, I want to schedule that. It was like, I was like, okay, this is my plumber, right? Uh you're pretty good. So I I think people are getting used to the technology being helpful in certain ways. So I think over time you'll see less and less kind of like uh allergic reactions to okay, here's my here's my personal uh chief of staff that's coming along with me and happens to mountain.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Yeah, so that's that's like going the one way where you know your plumber is adopting like this type of tool. Yeah. I thought you were gonna go the other way with that story. Yeah, I have three AC units in my house. And so I got a quote to like repair these things. I know nothing about HVAC units. Yeah. So I'm talking to, I'm just putting in the quote and the invoice and my models and all this stuff into GPT to try to just learn, right? You know, to try to really figure out what I I mean, I don't know a ton about HVAC. I I would say almost know nothing about HVAC. And so, how can you educate me so that I can make this decision about what's needed and what's not and and all that kind of stuff? So I think even if they're not bringing it into a meeting, even if you're not talking to them about it, it's very possible that any deliverable or presentation or recommendation or or proposal that you're giving to someone, they're gonna have a second set of eyes on it.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

And I think that's good. I think uh again, going back to the the medical thing, like you know, people have gotten a lot more educated on uh on their own health and capabilities. I think, you know, things like car buying, right? Like a completely different uh dynamic today. You go into a car dealership, very educated on all kinds of things. I think that's that's really helpful for consumers to kind of take control, have a baseline uh for things and not just be like, okay, you know, the this old adage in you know, management, like you would never ask your team to do something that you haven't done yourself, right? For a long time, people say, well, I don't want to, my finance is too anxiety, uh, really, right? I don't want to deal with it. But I think that the people that really want to be educated and maybe haven't had the skills can can actually benefit a lot from that. And then having a better discussion with their advisor about those things, right? And I think advisors should be open to that and saying, yeah, here's that output is right here. Here's where we would challenge some of that thinking. Um, here's how we think about it. But I think they should be open to it.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Where do we think this goes for advisors in? I don't even want to say five years because that just feels what does this look like in two to three years for advisors? How how much change should they be preparing for right now?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Yeah, and it's funny because the data does think about a 10 years, and it was uh, I think 90% of the advisors said they don't believe they'll be obsolete in 10 years, which is great. I think they're they're feeling less feared, more comfortable about this. But we we believe very firmly that the advisors are really important because of you know, trust, empathy, judgment that are distinctly human characteristics that advisors bring to the table. The changes that we expect are, first of all, there's I forgot the name of the law, but there's some kind of like limit to how many clients you can effectively service at a given time because you're you're mentally kind of dealing with that, even if it's all systematized. And so I think advisors will have the opportunity to actually service a lot more clients than they have to been been able to historically. Um they'll have a lot more assistance uh from the operational tasks and even potentially being able to over open up kind of lower tier services that they may not be able to focus on personally, but they they want to kind of build a feeder uh program or something like that. The other areas I think uh holistic capabilities are going to be a lot more common for advisors, uh, much more accessible because of the technology. So not just an investment portfolio advisory capability, but also kind of be become the general contractor of the financial lifes across, you know, healthcare planning, retirement planning, insurance needs, estate tax needs, and things like that. So they their aperture, I think, will potentially become a lot wider through the technology where they'll be able to offer or at least kind of oversee kind of the um the capabilities where they're not full professionals in.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

Yeah, I see that too. The you know it's almost like if their role doesn't expand, then it's going to be a big challenge for them. Yeah. Because even whatever, perplexities financial dashboard that you can upload 10,000 financial institutions or some crazy number and query and ask all the questions and all this stuff. So if your role is just in data aggregation, you know, to me, that's pretty small. So I like where you're going in terms of like holistic and pulling in more things for people. And you know, we hear terms like integration or expert generalist. It's funny, people sometimes refer to this as the advice industry, and then they immediately go to financial advice. Right. Right. But I feel like the really good advisors are just going to be helping people with advice. That's right. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

I I talked to my advisor a couple weeks ago and I was asking, I think about long-term care, right? I'm getting to that age. Do I do I need to buy a long-term care policy? And he is. Are you getting to that age? I think I gotta start thinking about it. Okay, all right. So it was a great discussion. He gave me kind of a really good perspective on like, hey, that industry's changed a lot over the last, you know, 10 years. There's here's kind of how we view that now. And he wasn't trying to sell me anything. It was just like, well, here's what I know about it. And I think it's really valuable that just having that. And I think we know that human relationships compound over time, right? So as you as you get history with an advisor, they get to know you, they get to know your family, then they know your dog's name, right? They kind of build that cumulative context with you. AI is not there yet, right? And it might be at some point it becomes, you know, the the context becomes really persistent and and kind of accumulates over time, where you have this, you know, your your own AI that just starts to know you better than you know yourself over time. I think that's still a ways to go. So having, you know, someone that you're actually investing time in building a relationship, they know you, they know a lot about you that's not in your data. I think that's really valuable and it will be valuable for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Yeah, I mean, like at Total Family, one of the things we say is like GPT doesn't know how your parents met.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yes, that's a great you know, so there's still a lot of things that are are not on the internet, not publicly available that are specific to your story, your family's story. Just saying Matt manages our money maybe isn't as compelling as it used to be, but we're trying to get advisors to say Matt understands our family's legacy. That's right. And what our parents wanted and what I wanted for my children. And they have this really complete picture of what we're doing, and that allows him to help us make decisions consistent with our values, consistent with what we're trying to do, that aren't just simple financial decisions. Because if it's just like the rate of return calculation based on these inputs, that decision can be made without any advisor help. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

What would we say to the compliance teams? Because one stat was 55% felt like compliance were a barrier. Now, that's probably advisors are salespeople in many ways. So I think sales and compliance have always had uh some friction in their relationship. So maybe that's like consistent anyway. But but what do you think? Like, how should the compliance teams be thinking about this? Because they they run the risk of more so than ever if they're just slow by the time they even get to they're like, you know, there's probably a compliance team saying, like, okay, we can use GPT three now.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

You know, and everyone's like, we're two and a half years past that. Yes, yeah. What do you think they should do?

SPEAKER_01 35:00

I mean, the the the someone told me a long time ago, like a good lawyer never tells you no, they tell you how, here's how. Like uh, I think it's the same thing, right? You can't have innovation without guardrails. I think that's pretty clear, and especially not in this industry, right? Everything's built on these fiduciary obligations. So every piece of advice, every recommendation, all those communications kind of carry weight. So it isn't really a question of like guardrails versus speed. It's like how do we build those guardrails? And that that's what the compliance teams really are trying to figure out. How do we stay close to the leading edge of this without, you know, running off a cliff? Uh, and no one wants to be on the front page of you know the Wall Street Journal on these things. So having clear policies, not treating governance as an accelerator, not a break. So it gives you know gives people like the boundaries that that they can operate in safely. So I think that's really where uh where the compliance teams are need to and want to be thinking. Well, discussions I've had with compliance teams is they're, you know, they they they they want to structure the guardrails uh so that the innovation can could be not impeded as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

All right. So I'm gonna leave you with uh one final question. If if there's an advisor who is not adopting these tools, or maybe just someone who's overly skeptical, what would you tell them? Whether or not they've leaned in at all, or they're just very like, this is a bubble, this isn't, I don't need to learn this, I'm retiring at five years, whatever their reasons are, what would you say to that skeptic?

SPEAKER_01 36:26

I would say, you know, start with one thing, right? Just be open to one thing. Pick a repetitive task in your week that eats up your time, right? And just see, like do a test, like that, you know, let AI take a swing at it. Like uh maybe that's meeting summaries, maybe it's CRM data entry, you know, maybe it's a thing that they don't like to do that they should be doing, right? And kind of let AI have a crack at it. Uh, don't sign up for a new platform. Just test it on something small and kind of see what happens. And, you know, you can see like if you pay attention to what you do with the time you got back, right? Is that valuable? That's a real signal, right? And then uh can you spend it on a deeper client prep? Can you run more scenarios? Can you put a, you know, make a phone call that you've kind of been putting off? So that's what I would tell them. Like, you know, try try something really small and see if that pays off for you. And if it does, then maybe there's more opportunities, even if you're, you know, close to the end of your career uh as an advisor. Like there, there's still opportunities to kind of make your work more enjoyable in that time frame.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Matt Matthews, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Advisor 360. Thank you so much for coming on for this report. And we really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you. That's it for Visionary Advisor. Thank you to our guest and to Total Family, whose software is helping advisors do legacy better. If you're a fan of Visionary Advisor, please subscribe and share it with another top notch wealth advisor like yourself. And we'll see you next time.