‘You need time to be human’: How to free up resources through AI

It can be easy to see the ever-increasing reliance on digital tools that remove the human from parts of the advice process as limiting the personal touch; however, Marin Wealth managing director Pedro Marin Ramirez believes it gives advisers more time to focus on those parts of the client experience.

“You need time to be human,” Marin Ramirez said at the Advisor Innovation Summit in Melbourne last week.

Explaining how Marin Wealth began its journey with AI, he said they went “really crazy” with client detail through every part of the advice process.

Once the advice is actually delivered to the client and they aren’t set for another meeting for up to a year, that’s where advisers can begin to leverage the data to maintain the relationship.

“What happens in between that year? Literally, we map it all out,” Marin Ramirez said.

“In between all that, how much time does it take for each step? … At the end of that year that I supposedly wasn’t doing anything for the client, I messaged them on their birthdays, I called them on random stuff, I put alerts on stuff for their kids, themselves – anything that I can think that’s going to add value to them.”

He added that not only are there these small benefits to keeping engaged with the client, they also “expect us to use AI”.

“I email [clients] probably within half an hour of everything we spoke about. At the beginning it was like, ‘Whoa, how did you reply so fast?’ Obviously, AI,” Marin Ramirez said.

“We take transcripts, everything is automated, and that creates a more personalised aspect of my time being in random stuff like their birthdays, and where do their kids work, the name of their dogs and stuff like that.”

Importantly, he added, advice practices need to be taking a forward-looking attitude to their implementation of AI tools, which are still in their early stages.

“We’ll see more so predictions being faster, more efficient, bigger for business. Everyone should be in a growth mindset, because what you’re doing today, it’s not for today. It’s for five years [from now],” Marin Ramirez said.

“It takes a long time for you to eat good practice, to actually implement it, to make sure that everything is safe, to understand it. Some stuff, we have absolutely no clue, and I would be lying to you if I said I know exactly how that data works, I know exactly where the storage facility is located – nobody has any clue. But I do know that sometimes, if the problem is complex, you can solve it very easily.

He added: “For example, to build your advice fee, we all say the database, privacy and all this stuff. What happens if you change the name to client one, client two, and still do the whole advice piece and then find and replace in Word? That’s it. You just put client one, client two, and AI does the whole thing, and then dump it into a Microsoft Word and go and find and replace there’s your privacy [issue] gone. Because I don’t care what that is. It makes no difference.”