The floodgates of generative AI use for advisor marketing and communications are open and the pace of development is accelerating quickly.
The rate of announcements of partnerships and collaborations, as well as the outright launch of available products, is so dizzying it’s hard to keep up. Here, your very human tech columnist tries to keep track and make sense of it all.
In the Beginning …
In March, we reported on marketing software and services company FMG’s rollout of its AI-powered content personalization engine, which integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist advisors with writing content such as blogs and social media posts.
Hearsay Systems, known for its communications management and monitoring technology and services to large firms, in April announced as part of its Content+ rollout that it partnered with Jasper AI to help advisors create written materials. Jasper AI uses several large language models including ChatGPT to both write and summarize articles and help advisors generate other forms of content.
Also in April, Catchlight, an AI-driven prospecting application revealed it developed an automated generative AI prospect email feature built directly into its platform that enables advisors to send auto-generated and personalized emails to prospective new clients.
In May, Orion Advisor Solutions debuted its new integration with Open AI’s ChatGPT 3.5, called Redtail Speak. The platform uses the previous 20 text messages between advisors and clients to generate prompts and responses to questions and its use will likely be expanded into other areas of advisor-client communications.
The Minds Behind the Machines
At the beginning of June, we introduced readers to six additional generative AI products (the six “Minds Behind the Machines” profiles) meant either specifically for advisors or for use in the financial services industry with advisors on their roadmaps.
One of those fell specifically into the category of automated content or communications generation—SIFA, which was started by a former financial advisor and intended specifically for advisors and uses its own large language models. It was built to automate ongoing communications between advisors and their clients and was in beta during the latter half of 2022 and launched in January 2023.
But Wait, There’s More
Fast forward to this week and three separate generative AI announcements related to creating automated communications that either pertain directly to advisors now or will soon.
First, Nitrogen (known as Riskalyze for the last decade) entered into a strategic alliance with FMG. According to the companies, the collaboration integrates the email marketing and website creation features of FMG’s digital marketing platform with the risk alignment, financial planning, proposal generation and client engagement tools of the Nitrogen Growth Platform.
Advisors using both products already will have immediate access to the new features and integrations. The latter makes the Nitrogen marketing toolkit, which includes a lead generation questionnaire, available from within the FMG all-in-one marketing and website creation platform.
At its annual user conference Nitrogen showed off its own “Nitrogen AI,” which makes use of several off-the-shelf generative AI engines.
Then there is Wealth Management GPT, described as a “writing tool designed exclusively for advisors,” meant to help them “deliver highly effective and personalized messaging and financial education to their clients, prospects and the communities they serve,” according to a company announcement.
It specifically uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT engine connected via API and had a well-known list of industry insiders helping with its development. Wealth Management GPT was founded by Marc Butler, most recently the president and COO of Skience.
No. 3 on our list is another partnership, this time between TIFIN (previously known as an AI-focused fintech startup incubator, which now considers itself an AI platform for wealth), and the global private markets investment manager Hamilton Lane.
The TIFIN-Hamilton Lane duo will be launching an AI-powered investment assistant that will combine Hamilton Lane's private markets data and intelligence with TIFIN's AI technology.
The technology will be available as an API and is intended for integration within the wealth platforms and digital marketplaces used by advisors and investors allocating to the private markets. It is expected to provide benchmarking on those markets, as well as forecasting, and will “help educate private wealth investors and their intermediaries,” and integrate “as a conversational interface,” according to the release.
And finally, according to a company spokesperson, this last (for now) announcement, a partnership between Salesforce and Deloitte Digital should be available to advisory firms in the next six to nine months. It could prove to be a big deal given the large footprint the CRM provider has among large advisory firms.
Salesforce has partnered with Deloitte Digital to help organizations implement and scale Salesforce AI Cloud, a suite of generative AI-powered applications. Deloitte itself recently announced a new Generative AI practice group and its “Trustworthy AI framework” for helping clients develop their AI strategies and put safeguards in place.
All that, and the first half of the year is just ending. The rollouts are sure to continue apace.