Ditching the ‘individual side hustles’ approach to AI utilisation

For advice practices that want to better utilise AI within the business, Dean Holmes, co-founder of The Wealth Network, said on a Netwealth webinar that switching to a structured and intentional approach is key.

Namely, Holmes said practice owners should be “starting to build AI-powered businesses, not AI-powered individuals”.

Much like rolling out anything new in a business, Holmes explained, practices need to have proven, consistent processes on how the technology is used, noting that a lack of sufficient standardisation on how any new tools should be used is usually the reason rollouts are unsuccessful.

“It fails predominantly because every different staff member is using different AI technology. They’re not sharing how they’re going with AI, and we’re not coming up with a framework in order to implement AI consistently,” Holmes said.

“So, what we need to work towards is actually having a prompt library within our businesses, AI policies within our business and AI processes, so that we can start to get this momentum of AI embedded within the business.”

In order to keep the use of AI consistent across a business, Holmes argued that individual staff members can no longer be allowed to choose what AI tools they do or don’t want to use.

“We can’t let them play anymore. As we move to this organisational business AI, we need to start to put these things into focus,” he said.

However, Holmes said it isn’t enough for a practice to just decide to roll out AI tools, they will need to do adequate preparation to plan out what and how they want to go about introducing AI tools in a way that works for both staff and clients.

“We actually have to do this work ahead of time,” he said.

“Instead of being a preschooler and just playing with the tools and thinking they’re interesting, is going forward from here as we actually want to bring this into our business and do it consistently for every client every time.

“In order to do that, we’ve gotta have this business of running this as a business project, not individual side hustles when it comes to the AI.”

Looking more at the client aspect, it is important for practices that choose to utilise AI tools to be transparent about this with clients and have a responsible AI policy with answers ready for when they inevitably have questions, particularly when it comes to security concerns.

“We need to lean into the fact that clients will know that we’re using AI, and we should not hide from that fact,” he said.

“So, as your clients ask, if you’ve got a responsible AI policy and you share that with clients, that’s going to make clients happier in terms of working with you. We need that client-facing document to work with clients.”