Why AI notetakers alone can't fix 'broken' advisor meetings

It's been several weeks since Aaron Klein, the founder of Riskalyze – the risk analysis software that rebranded itself to Nitrogen in 2023 – came out to say advisor meetings are "broken" and that AI notetakers "just record the misery."

But just for the record: Klein is not saying that growing piece of advisors' tech toolkit is useless at all.

"It's super useful to be more fully engaged and not have to spend cycles trying to take notes while you listen to what clients are saying," Klein said in a recent interview with InvestmentNews. "The problem with these apps is that they started in the wrong place."

Missing the mark on client meetings

Klein sees recording, transcribing, summarizing, and storing conversation notes in a CRM as a "very obvious use of [AI] technology." But what the industry's rush into AI notetaking is missing, in his view, is the chance to make client meetings even better.

Recalling his time at Nitrogen, where he now sits as a board member, Klein says much of the work he did there involved helping advisors tell their stories more effectively by centering their meetings around a clients' risk number. Now, he's building on that work with a new venture called Contio, a soon-to-launch AI startup he founded with his own capital along with investments from Ric Edelman, Scott Hanson, and other prominent names in the industry.

"If you're using other perhaps less effective tools, figuring out how to frame your message can be a real challenge for a lot of advisors," he says. "There's a lot of advisors having performance-focused conversations. There are a lot of advisors who like to have conversations centered on eMoney or Moneyguide, or tax-focused conversations, or estate planning conversations. So it is a really broad set of topics."

Between the blizzard of wealth tech apps now recorded on Michael Kitces' notoriously dizzying FinTech Map and the different facets of wealth management more generally – including questions around portfolio management, required minimum distributions, custody, trust accounts, different flavors of IRAs, and more – Klein says it can be too easy for advisors to get bogged down in technicalities when clients just want to know what their advisor is achieving for them.

Beyond that, he says not every advisor is born with the gift of storytelling, though he argues the art can be democratized more widely through AI.

"Advisors are very good at communicating, but there's a difference between communicating and being able to come up with the way to frame a complex set of topics in a way that your client can really understand and grasp," he says. "Weaving all of that together and creating a cohesive narrative, that's something that I see many advisors spend three or four hours preparing for a one hour client review. We can make that better. We can make that a lot faster."

'Take your worst client meeting, and make it 100 times better'

By leveraging AI, he says advisors will be better able to take the signals from various parts of their tech stack, mix and match them in a way that makes sense to the advisor, and help set up a better meeting with clients. He also believes taking the ability to recall the different items they've worked with a particular client on beyond the natural capabilities of human memory can create a real advantage.

"The important part is to take your worst client meeting and make it 100 times better, and to take your best client meeting and make it 10 times better," Klein says. "I really believe AI can do that."

Having gone over 37,000 meetings he attended over 12 and a half years in the industry, Klein maintains that advisors should never drop client meetings into the "could've been an email" bucket, though he agrees the additional hours of prep work currently being sunk into them should be reclaimed. Internal huddles with staff, compliance, and other stakeholders in their practice, he adds, "can absolutely get snappier, can get smarter, [and] can get more action-packed."

That conviction appears to be resonating across the wealth community. Since the announcement of Contio's fall launch, Klein says throngs of people have engaged with the company's posts on LinkedIn, including tongue-in-cheek skits riffing on the current state of meetings and interviews with wealth leaders recounting their worst experiences.

Klein says the interest has extended to action within Contio's early access list, with many advisors raising their hands to try out the new platform.

"AI is one of those products where you want to get a diverse set of people on it, and you want to get a lot of feedback from it," Klein says, "so we're excited about that."