Autonomous AI & AGI: Introduction to the Wealth Management Marketing Stack of the Future

I want to say something right out of the gate - the AI revolution we are living in the middle of needs to contribute to the shortage of financial advisors we have in America today. We can create the best tech in the World but you're still going to enough advisors to adopt it and scale with it.

[Source, Barron's: Here's how Bad the Financial Advisor Talent Shortage Really is]

As an AI optimist though, I believe that AI is going to usher in a new wave of independent entrepreneurial advisors by empowering younger advisors to utilize a new AI tech stack that would make it more simpler to scale, not necessarily easier, but definitely more simpler.

Like a single login marketing engine to run your marketing operations - end-to-end.

Imagine a world where engagement with AdvisorTech is purely conversational, you know like the way you text or prompt ChatGPT.

Tech adoption and learning curves could be brought to zero.

For core AdvisorTech software systems like CRM, financial planning and marketing automation conversational AI will soon be the de-facto engagement layer and simplify the AdvisorTech stack.

RIA Marketing Intelligence and Intro to AGI:

At Wealth I/O we're working towards an interface where rows and columns inside clunky dashboards are replaced with an intelligent conversational marketing AI agent that can execute actions on your behalf and pull insights from your marketing analytics.

Imagine a virtual CMO trained on your firm's branding, core offerings and USP, compressed inside a super-intelligent chatbot that can execute anything for your marketing needs.

Welcome to the world of autonomous agents or as I would call it, a foretaste to "AGI" or artificial general intelligence. An all-knowing general AI system that can do anything a wealth management marketing team can.

First, let me help explain the difference between ANI and AGI. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is what we all use today with ChatGPT, but ChatGPT's ability to see and hear through it's image processing/voice to text translation capability is a minor foretaste of AGI.

Advisors, allow me to illustrate this dystopian future:

1. ANI in Advisor Marketing: Imagine AI as a highly efficient staff member in your RIA firm, named "Alex," who is an expert in email marketing. Alex excels at creating and sending out personalized email campaigns to your clients. He analyzes past email performances, understands what type of content engages different segments of your clientele, and optimizes the sending times for maximum open rates. However, if you ask Alex to handle social media marketing or direct client interactions, he wouldn’t be able to do it. His expertise is solely in email marketing.
2. AGI in Advisor Marketing: Now, imagine AGI as a versatile staff member, "Sam," who can handle any marketing task you assign. Sam is not only great at email marketing like Alex but can also seamlessly manage your firm’s social media, create engaging content, execute compliance reviews, analyze market trends, and even help in strategic decision-making for marketing growth. The beauty of Sam’s abilities lies in his adaptability. If a new marketing platform emerges or there's a shift in market trends/client preferences, Sam can quickly learn and master these new challenges, just like any skilled human marketer would.

I'm casting a little bit of vision here of how our company is already thinking about our AI vision, it's impossible to predict it but it's not a moonshot to think of a dystopian like world where AGI manages end-to-end back-office processes and a lot of advisor-functions like marketing automation and CRM.

So, generically speaking across industries, we're 50-60% more likely 5 years away from superintelligence according to a few experts like Shane Legg, the Co-Founder of Google's DeepMind who is the brains (literally) behind Google's newest Gemini AI model.

Elon Musk thinks we're 3 years away from it.

So let this soak in for a moment - all the AI that you see and use today is the least capable AI you will ever use.

That's because these systems of intelligence are becoming exponentially better everyday.

We need to be ready for what's to come - some like Shane Legg from DeepMind would argue that the next 20 years could mark itself as the true golden age of humanity.

Unlocked superintelligence - at scale. What does this mean for the world of wealth management marketing?

Let me contextualize this with practical AI applications for registered investment advisors. But this can be applied across several verticals within financial services.

Building systems of marketing AI agents for RIAs:

First, in a world of autonomous AI marketing you will need multiple "AI agents" working together like digital workers, synchronously along with the firm's brand guidelines and compliance requirements.

This cannot be a system of agents carelessly generating output from across AI models without a supervising layer of compliance and accuracy checkers.

Here's a practical example:

Content Marketing and Compliance Solved at Scale:

You will have one simple chat interface where you can chat and talk with your virtual CMO and the virtual CMO will correspond with your other AI agents performing different marketing functions in a loop.

You decide the goal and the AI goes off to work. For ex. "Send an email campaign about the drop in the Fed's interest rates to newly onboarded clients."

The AI agent sends a request to the content agent, the content agent sends it to the compliance agent, the compliance agent sends it to the design agent and automatically drop's the campaign in your CCO's email with keywords it's not 100% sure about.

The CCO's work for email campaign review is probably reduced to 5 minutes.

The CCO offers feedback, the model learns and gets better so it doesn't make the same mistake again and then sends it off to your clients.

Completely autonomously.

Your job as an advisor will then be completely focussed on advice, studying portfolios, markets and becoming a rich educational resource for your prospects and clients.

NOT trying to remember the password to your email marketing software or losing your mind over something you don't understand with the automations and feeling stuck.

Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing more AI agent use-cases which I believe are coming for the wealth management industry.

I'm the Founder & CEO of Wealth I/O - we're building the marketing growth engine for RIA's. I write on artificial intelligence, advisor technology and leadership development. Subscribe to my newsletter for the latest in AI contextualized to wealth management marketing. Visit https://wealthio.com to know more.