With each passing decade, not only does technology evolve at an ever more dramatic pace, but each new wave comes faster than the last. From the advent of the computer chip in the 1950s to the rise of the personal computer nearly 25 years later in the early 1980s, to the emergence of the internet just 15 years thereafter in the late 1990s, to mobile smartphones only 10 years after that in the late 2000s, to ‘robos’ less than a decade later in the 2010s, and most recently to AI, which ‘suddenly’ went mainstream in late 2022 when ChatGPT burst onto the scene – the pace of technological change seems to be accelerating inexorably. And with the advent of AI in particular, questions have emerged about whether technology will replace many human jobs, including financial advisors.
Yet now, two years later, AI has not driven a mass wave of unemployment. Instead, it’s being allocated to far more specific – but still very relevant and helpful – use cases that don’t replace professional service providers and instead simply leverage their time to be even more efficient. In the case of financial advisors in particular, this has included everything from using ChatGPT as a brainstorming buddy for developing an advisor marketing plan, to generating a first draft of a client newsletter (as it’s far easier to edit something already there than to write on a blank slate), to adopting what has quickly become the hottest AI-driven solution in advisor technology: AI Notetakers to support the client meeting.
In practice, rapid adoption of AI Notetakers has been expedited both by the media’s fixation on Artificial Intelligence (which has highlighted a wide range of AI solutions like Fathom, Fireflies, and Otter) and by the rollout of AI Notetakers within existing platforms (from Microsoft’s CoPilot to Zoom’s AI Companion). But when it comes to financial advisors, our own Kitces Research on Advisor Productivity shows that while some of the “generic” solutions have gained market share the fastest, it turns out that the industry-specific solutions like Jump and Zocks lead in advisor satisfaction (while ironically, #1-adopted Zoom AI Companion actually ranks the lowest!). This is largely because, for financial advisors, it’s not ‘just’ about capturing notes from the client meeting itself, but also about managing everything that follows: recording meeting notes in the CRM for compliance purposes, assigning post-meeting tasks to the team, and sending the client a post-meeting recap email. For which industry-specific providers are building the entire advisor-CRM-integrated workflow.
Yet the irony is that for many advisors, saving time on client meeting notetaking is difficult when those tasks have already been delegated – to the team’s Associate Advisor. In fact, as our Kitces Research data shows, adoption of AI Meeting Notes tools has been most common amongst “pure solo” advisors, who have no one to delegate to (and instead find great leverage in delegating to an AI Notetaker). Nonetheless, AI Notetakers are not just for solo advisors; instead, they’re also increasingly popular amongst larger (e.g., four to five person) teams, where it’s easier to share out the AI’s post-meeting notes to get everyone on the team (who may not have been in the meeting) up to speed. In addition, AI Notetakers are increasingly popular as advisors’ financial plans get increasingly comprehensive; not surprisingly, the more detailed financial planning conversations happen in client meetings, the more there is to capture and share out.
At the same time, AI Meeting Notes tools themselves continue to evolve rapidly. What wasn’t even a category of software just two years ago has now raised tens of millions of dollars in just the AdvisorTech domain alone, for what is not only nominally “notetaking” software, but increasingly covering the entire client meeting lifecycle (meeting notes → record notes in CRM → queue up post-meeting tasks → draft post-meeting recap email →→→ pre-meeting agenda for the next client meeting), and then leveraging the cumulative data to provide even more recall details for advisors about what happened in prior meetings.
In the long run, it seems clear that AI Meeting Notes tools are here to stay. In fact, with their increasingly comprehensive coverage of the entire client relationship, perhaps the biggest question is simply whether they’ll remain standalone tools or, instead, if CRM systems for financial advisors will eventually offer their own built-in versions (since that’s where the rest of the data about client relationships already resides!?).
Either way, the landscape of AI in advisor technology continues to evolve fast. And we’re committed to keeping track of it with our Kitces Research. Which is why we’re also launching our latest Kitces AdvisorTech survey, to collect data on the latest in how advisors are actually using technology. So if you have a few minutes, please take our AdvisorTech survey linked at the end of this article!
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