Perplexity AI's pitch to RIAs: run a 50-person firm with one advisor

Perplexity, an AI startup reportedly valued around $20 billion, anticipates its financial engine will help small RIAs reach the “efficiency of a very highly staffed larger firm without having to add more headcount,” in what could fuel a boom for solo independent advisors. 

“An advisor who really knows how to take advantage of these tools can make a one-person shop feel like a 50-person shop,” Jeff Grimes, Perplexity’s head of live events product, told InvestmentNews. “I do think you'll see maybe more of a burgeoning of these smaller institutions because of the operating efficiency. It's more possible for one person or two people to start a really powerful advisory, maybe in a way that it wasn't before.”

Perplexity Computer, which aggregates answers from Anthropic’s Claude, Gemini, Grok, and OpenAI, and other AI models, is priced at $20 per month for a Pro subscription to automate investment and financial planning tasks for advisors. Perplexity positions this as a more affordable option than the large-scale enterprise market that’s been led by Anthropic, which struck advisor partnerships in February with LPL Financial and Orion. 

“We think that really premium quality financial information shouldn't be gated to people who have access to $30,000 a year per-seat subscription. And if you have that, that's great, but a lot of firms don't have access to that, and something like Computer basically supercharges them,” said Grimes.

Perplexity has struck partnerships to extract financial data and news from SEC filings, FactSet, S&P Global, Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, Morningstar, PitchBook, Coinbase, Quartr, Unusual Whales, among other companies and exchanges. Advisors can upload client documents on their accounts and type prompts into Perplexity Computer to provide risk analysis and oversight within five minutes, says Grimes.

“I can say, let's do a recurring task where every week or every day, it's fully customizable, I'd like you to surface any risks or oversights for all of my clients. Are there missing or outdated beneficiary designations? Are there certain exposures that look too large? Are there opportunities to mitigate risk? Are there large cash balances sitting idle for any of my clients? Are there accounts or trusts or estate documents that haven't been reviewed in the last several years that someone should take a look at?”

Most Americans (61%) believe AI will replace financial advisors within five years, according to a CouponFollow survey of 1,009 adults. The study adds that 42% of Americans regularly use AI for personal finance and that 48% trust ChatGPT more than advisors for quick financial answers, although Grimes is clear in that Perplexity positions its AI tools to support and not replace financial advisors.

“If you had a client that's really heavy on minerals and heavy metals, you could say, alert me whenever [Argentina president] Javier Milei visits Chile or Bolivia or China or Saudi Arabia and lithium is on the agenda, or he's accompanied by mining company CEOs,” Grimes suggested as a prompt for Perplexity. “I can say, alert me anytime any household among my clients has more than 15% exposure to a single company after accounting for direct stocks and ETFs and mutual funds, RSUs and options— you can fully customize it. Alert me whenever a Walmart executive sells stock,” he said of other examples.

In addition to challenging Anthropic’s wealth management plug-ins, Perplexity’s play for advisors comes as OpenAI announced earlier this month it acquired the personal finance startup Hiro, signaling the ChatGPT-maker’s push into financial services. Grimes gave another example of how Perplexity Computer’s alert system can help an advisor’s college planning for a client.

“Say the Johnson family, they have four kids, here's their ages, here's where they're in school. Send me an alert anytime any of them might be considering a new school with a tuition change. Even if that might not trigger until a year from now, Computer will keep that in its memory and keep checking at whatever frequency you want,” said Grimes. “It’s letting you fill in the gaps of what you might have missed. It's letting you operate with the efficiency of a much larger team.”

Perplexity Computer launched in February and its original financial focus was to serve retail investors through its Plaid integration that lets users upload their brokerage accounts. More than 75% of paying Perplexity users visit monthly to ask financial questions, according to the company.

“We've generally seen that there is a funnel from users who are starting with a retail touch point, maybe initially for their personal investing, but then they start using it for work, still on a personal account, but using it for work, and then maybe they bring it into their firm, and then their firm fully adopts it as enterprise,” said Grimes. 

Perplexity has 45 million active users, according to app industry analysis site Business of Apps. 

“I think we'll also see pathways where users are connecting their accounts, maybe they're just asking for a little bit of advice here and there for their own portfolio, they don't have a wealth advisor, and then we would have the opportunity to connect them with someone who can use Perplexity Computer as this force multiplier. I think we'll see things like that,” said Grimes on the potential funnel between advisors and retail investors on Perplexity.