Technology
A large share of what advisors are being sold as artificial intelligence is a general model with an industry prompt in front of it.
A large share of what advisors are being sold as artificial intelligence is a general-purpose model with an industry-specific prompt in front of it. That is not a criticism of the technique — it is genuinely useful for drafting and summarising. It is a criticism of the pricing and the positioning, because a wrapper is not a moat and should not be sold as one.
The way to tell: ask what the system knows that a general model does not. If the answer is "the prompt", you are buying a convenience. If the answer is "your book", you are buying something else.
| Task | Why AI fits |
|---|---|
| Drafting a client summary | Structure is repetitive, judgment stays with you |
| Preparing for a review | Assembling and ordering material a person then edits |
| Surfacing anomalies | Volume beats attention — the useful failure mode is a false positive, not a missed decision |
| Explaining a position in plain language | Translation, which models do well |
Not whether a vendor uses AI. Where your client data goes when they do.
Every system in your stack is adding this capability inside its own walls, under its own terms, with its own retention policy. Five vendors means five sets of answers to a question you will eventually be asked by a client or an examiner, and most firms cannot currently answer it for even one.
A model is only as useful as what it can see. A system that holds trading, billing, reporting, planning, risk and the client record together can reason across all of it. A model bolted onto one vendor's slice can only reason about that slice — and asking it to do more means moving client data between companies, which is where the governance problem starts.
That is the practical case for consolidation, and it is a different case from the one usually made. It is not about fewer logins. It is that the useful version of this technology requires a single view of the firm, and the number of vendors holding your data is the number of boundaries you have to defend.
We use AI where it earns its place and we do not describe the internals, because that is the part worth having. What we will say is the part that affects you: identifying client information is stripped before anything reaches a model, there is one boundary rather than five because there is one system, and SOC 2 certification is underway and completes this year.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
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