Want to work with athletes and entertainers? Here's how AI can help you get in the game

Financial advisors seeking to nab professional athletes and entertainers as clients better bone up on their AI expertise, according to a new report.

The study by PR and marketing agency Gregory looked at how major AI systems respond to wealth management queries, and tracked 279 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Some 20,771 responses were collected, with the study citing sources from 8,433 domains and over 27,000 web pages.

Importantly, the study found that firms that built web pages explicitly describing their work with specific client types were highly cited. “You have to make sure that you’re doing both the front-end stuff, making sure that you’re positioning yourself to reach these specific audiences, while also setting up your site to match with how the audience is going to be asking these questions,” Joe Anthony, president of Gregory, told InvestmentNews.

Creative Planning’s page for professional athletes was the most cited, with 320 citations, according to the research, followed by Morgan Stanley’s global sports and entertainment page, with 287 citations. Mercer Advisors’ page for professional athletes received 283 citations, while Mariner’s professional athletes wealth management page got 247 citations. Creative Planning’s page for ultra-high-net-worth wealth management was cited 213 times.

“For firms that serve physicians, tech founders, business owners, or any other defined client segment, the strategic takeaway is blunt: Build the page,” the report said. “A dedicated, detailed page describing your firm's specialization in serving that audience is the single highest-leverage AI search asset you can create.”

“Firms without persona-specific pages were largely absent from these results,” the report added.

Wealth management firms are acutely aware of the financial opportunities and challenges that faced by high-profile figures such as athletes. "Professional athletes often come into a good deal of money very quickly, and their finances and taxes become very complex," Gary Foodim, chief marketing officer at Mercer Advisors, told InvestmentNews. "At the same time, they have typically not worked with a family office before and may not understand the benefits."

"Athletes often have people pitching them investments or other ideas of what to do with their money, and so working with a family office protects them from people who don't have their best interest at heart," he added.

Last year Wells Fargo told InvestmentNews how the company helps protect professional athletes from poor financial decisions. Also last year, RIA VestGen Wealth Partners launched a service designed for professional athletes.

While big-name sports stars garner massive attention, it is not just established athletes that are looking to build wealth. A recent survey from Merrill Lynch found that young U.S. professional athletes are allocating 36% of their sports earnings to saving and investing, while dedicating only 6% to luxury items.

Underlining the increasingly close ties between wealth management and the world of sports, in 2024 Merrill Lynch and IMG Academy launched a partnership to bring financial education to student-athletes.