RIA executives discussed AI’s impact on the financial advisor industry at this week’s Goldman Sachs RIA Professional Investor Forum, with Dynasty Financial Partners CEO Shirl Penney previewing a “Virtual Shirl” AI model set to be rolled out around the next three months.
“Virtual Shirl has already reviewed the last five years of my emails, read hundreds of my speeches, white papers, understands my voice and cadence,” said Penney. “I think it will be a mass accelerator for people to get educated about Dynasty on the front end.”
Penney spoke at the third-annual Goldman Sachs RIA Professional Investor Forum in Manhattan on a panel with Cresset Capital CEO Susie Cranston, Hightower Advisors CEO Larry Restieri, and NewEdge Wealth co-founder Robert Sechan. Virtual Shirl could be the first of “hundreds of digital employees” coming to Dynasty Financial and the RIAs it supports with its technology and investment banking services.
“A younger generation may ultimately have more comfort in speaking with a bot or an avatar or engaging in AI,” said Penney. "They [Virtual Shirl] can walk you through to do financial modeling. If we can clone that, other service professionals and other components within the business are next up.”
New Edge Wealth, which runs a W-2 advisory model focused on upper-high-net-worth, family office, and institutional clients, has rolled out Anthropic’s Claude across the company. Sechan said New Edge’s M&A teams use Claude to build models with Excel and its marketing teams are using the AI for PowerPoints and video creations.
“It's an efficiency enhancer. And I think what it does for our business is, it doesn't mean we fire people, but it probably means we hire more slowly because the productivity that comes from leveraging these tools is critically important,” said Sechan, whose New Edge Wealth reported having 99 financial advisors, 211 total employees and roughly $20 billion in assets under management, per its Form ADV filed April 23.
“I think the key to AI is as leaders, to encourage people to use it. I think there's some embarrassment [when] you see the double dash in an email back. I want to see the double dashes. I don't care,” said Sechan. “Don't be embarrassed. Be embarrassed if you don't use it.”
Cranston, who was named CEO of the mega-RIA and multi-family office Cresset in March, echoed Sechan’s point of losing the stigma around workplace AI usage. “I think for those of us that lived through the dot-com bubble, the companies that made it were the ones where every employee embraced this new technology as opposed to outsourcing it to a digital internet expert who was going to fix the business model.”
Cranston referenced McKinsey & Company research that estimates the wealth management industry will face a shortage of about 100,000 advisors by 2034. She also explained that AI’s reduction impact on junior analyst roles comes as fewer people are passing CPA exams.
“If you look at the traditional training grounds for where wealthy individuals would get sophisticated tax and accounting professionals to support their family offices, those training grounds have gone away because of AI. They're not hiring big analyst classes the way that they used to,” said Cranston.
“Even with all the talk that AI is going to remove all the jobs ... I think that’s very unlikely in the ultra-high-net-worth space,” Cranston said. “I think you’re going to see a shortage of qualified, experienced talent, and I think that’s going to give scaled players an advantage because you’re going to really have to start thinking about how to cultivate that talent as the demand for family offices is really skyrocketing.”
Restieri, who led Goldman’s Ayco business before becoming CEO of Hightower last year, brought up his 26-year-old son’s reliance on speaking to a human financial advisor as a use case to support belief that younger generations will not want to rely entirely on AI.
“I do think people want to talk to people, especially at certain life events,” said Restieri. “A lot of the job of an advisor is a psychologist, and I think that's harder to replace. I think in certain things [AI] can replace it, but I don't think in all things.”
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