AI for advisers: partner or parasite?

The word “pilot” is one that comes up in numerous contexts. First episode of a TV show, the cool guys in Top Gun, the little blue flame in your mum’s oven. I’ve googled the word extensively, because of course we also named the world’s finest advice tech company Pilot. (Yep, I’m that shameless.)

I also came across this weird fish (stay with me here). A pilot fish is a small, carnivorous marine fish, that’s famous for its habit of swimming alongside larger beasts, like whales. This behaviour allows them to feed on leftover food from their bigger companions. 

Of late, I’ve come to think of the advice profession as the whale, and the endless array of “solutions” competing for little nibbles of our business as the pilot fish. And this analogy, to my mind, never rings truer than when thinking about the so-called “AI revolution”.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not rejecting AI out of hand. In fact, I’m more or less completely persuaded that this is an “adapt or die” scenario: AI won’t replace advisers, but advisers who use AI will replace those who don’t. That’s the bottom line.

However.

I also think the shine is already starting to come off this putative revolution, and I can certainly think of one reason why. That is, that a great many “solutions” don’t start with the adviser and work outwards; rather, they come up with a solution and then try and tell the adviser “here’s a problem you didn’t notice needed solving.

There are already good use cases, though, but they’re the ones which start from first principles. Meaning – in every instance – where is adviser time being wasted? Hence, the tools we’re probably already using are the ones that can crunch numbers, summarise documents, and basically perform the donkey work that nobody enjoys.

Maybe I’m one of those who’ll be left behind, but I simply don’t believe that AI can or will, however, be effectively employed in the parts of the role that require creativity, empathy, relationship-building, even the reading of body language – in a word, intuition.

That’s in effect the philosophy behind how we’ve went about building our own AI capacity. What I mean by that is that we fundamentally believe in our profession. We don’t see AI tools as mere staging posts in the journey towards the great replacement of advisers themselves.

Hence, we’re not about having you change your workflow to fit the machine; rather, we’re about letting the machine fit your – and indeed our – workflow. Our AI does a few things really well, and it’s part of the package – we will simply not countenance selling a continually burgeoning cost centre.

Put simply, at Pilot (a little counterintuitively!) we’re not the pilot fish, looking to find ever more scraps from your table. We are and will always remain firmly part of the whale, moving endlessly forwards in search of improving ourselves – and the profession we’re a part of.