The skyrocketing usage of AI does not mean that all advisors are on board, meaning that fund marketers must juggle traditional and innovative content strategies.
TL; DR: split AI-readable content per advisor group.
The financial advisory business has become a prominent adoption of AI. In fact, the use of one AI tool or another is nearly universal, found at 85% of advisors. A further 80% expect to do more with it across the next year.
More interesting to the sector is the fact that RIA’s client communications are fuelled by AI, whereas advisors affiliated with broker-dealers are not, even though they largely sell the same products to the same investors. Almost all independent RIAs report AI use, compared to only 30% of broker-dealer advisors.
It seems that the larger advisory groups (those that manage over $500 million in AuM) are the most committed to AI; 78% say they would leave a firm that lacked competitive AI capability, compared to 69% of overall advisors.
A reason for this AI fondness lies in surveyed advisors saving four or more hours a week on client comms; operational ‘effectiveness’ that can prove advantageous for fund marketing in a competitive space.
And the split between RIAs and broker-dealers is largely down to how communications are supervised. The former are independent and can more easily fold AI tools into their outbound processes. The latter’s compliance and review workflows are typically slower, and more risk averse to newfound capabilities that AI can offer.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Asset managers and fund marketing teams likely distribute through both of these channels, and herein lies the difficulty!
RIAs will be far more open to (or actively want) structured data, and machine-readable commentaries and factsheet formats that they can plug into their own AI drafting tools using KPIs. Broker-dealer facing content will still need to be produced under traditional requirements, better suited for lengthy review chains.
Then again, given that more client-facing content will be assisted by AI in future, any fund marketers will have to expect scrutiny over how their source content may be crunched down, over-simplified or reinterpreted by an advisor’s AI tools. Accuracy and attribution risk can fall out of a fund’s hands here, and that is a compliance problem involving legal teams.
AI’s regulatory oversight will become more important as the technology’s capabilities grow. This is something that many funds must be wary of right now, ready for the inevitable to happen.
Source
AssetMark Research, via GlobeNewswire, “More Than Half of Advisors Using AI Save 4+ Hours a Week”
