AI tools for financial advisors: Content creation

In a recent webinar for Equita Financial Network’s “Inspiring Insights” series, Charlie Van Derven of Social Advisors, Suleman Din of Action! magazine and I discussed the pros and cons of using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for content creation for financial advisors. 

The webinar presented an in-depth look at the transformative potential of AI tools like ChatGPT in content creation for financial advisors. Van Derven emphasized the capacity of AI to generate content quickly and at scale, making it a valuable tool for businesses that need to maintain a consistent online presence. 

Din posed questions about the potential risks associated with AI use cases for wealth management, including issues related to content originality and the necessity for human oversight. 

As a part of the panel, I focused on the balance between automation and human touch, stressing that while AI can help expedite content creation, it should not completely replace human creativity and intuition. Financial advisors can benefit if they learn the ropes and avoid ugly pitfalls. 

Pros and cons of AI tools for financial advisors

As you contemplate using AI tools like ChatGPT for your content creation needs, remember to weigh the pros and cons, understand the potential risks and consider how it fits into your overall content strategy.

On the plus side, AI-generated content can be used to create content at scale, saving financial advisors time and increasing productivity. It can create content that is tailored to specific audiences and can be more cost-effective than human-written content. Another plus is that it can be used to create optimized content for search engines. 

Marc Butler, the creator of Wealth Management GPT, a new AI platform that lays over the top of ChatGPT, told me that the AI opportunity in wealth management is limitless, saying, “AI has the power to change our industry in ways similar to what we saw when the internet came of age, and firms, advisors and clients started to engage digitally. We are in the first inning of a nine-inning game, and the AI story within wealth management will evolve, but firms and advisors who embrace it now will benefit over the long term. The impact of AI is not an ‘if’ question, but is instead a ‘when’ question.”

One challenge for advisors, generally, is their ability to communicate consistently with their clients while personalizing the content and helping clients understand in the simplest ways possible what they are talking about – and to do all this in a scalable way. 

“Tools like ChatGPT can help on all these fronts, but advisors don’t understand its operation. The problem with an advisor using ChatGPT directly is that they have to understand how to structure the prompts to get the output they are looking for, and many advisors I have spoken with have been afraid to use ChatGPT,” Butler adds. 

Butler’s platform guides the advisor through a series of questions to help the AI generate a better response. By focusing on specific scenarios (i.e., “write a blog”) and following a sequence of steps, advisors can harness the power of ChatGPT in an easy-to-use format in a language they understand. The design of Wealth Management GPT is so simple that it does not require training. In the “write a blog” scenario, for example, advisors can – in about 20 seconds – produce a 500-word blog on a particular topic geared toward a specific audience and written in an easily understood way. 

My warning – no matter how tempting it is to copy and paste the content and use it as is, never, ever do that. AI should be used as a collaboration tool rather than replace human creativity. Pitfalls of relying too heavily on AI-generated content include plagiarism and lack of distinctiveness in writing style. 

In addition, everyone I’ve spoken with who’s more advanced than I am in using ChatGPT warns that it is prone to “hallucinations. When I asked ChatGPT about hallucinations, it responded, “As an AI language model, ChatGPT operates based on patterns and associations it has learned from the vast amount of text data it was trained on. While it can generate text that appears coherent and contextually relevant, it does not possess consciousness, awareness or the ability to hallucinate.” 

However, ChatGPT has limitations, and it can sometimes produce responses that may seem nonsensical, irrelevant or ‘hallucinatory’ in a sense that they are not grounded in reality or the given context.”

So rule #1 for financial advisors should be – using AI-generated content critically and verifying information. Of course, any output from ChatGPT that gets shared with clients must go through whatever compliance review processes are already in place.

Also, advisors should take care not to feed into any generative AI platform content that is confidential, proprietary or sensitive (think client lists and other of your intellectual property) as that information then becomes “training material” for the tool and could surface in different AI-generated responses. In addition, consider that it might not be possible to copyright material generated by AI.

Want to watch a replay of the webinar?
Email Dori Thomas and she will waive the standard fee
and send you the link. You can also read the summary description of the webinar here. 

Other examples of AI use

I experimented with several generative AI tools to prepare for the three-person panel discussion. In addition to my continued use of Grammarly, Canva, Fireflies.AI and the Adobe Creative Suite – my team and I were already power users of these tools – I focused more on their AI possibilities. 

I also experimented with ChatGPT3.5 (the free version of OpenAI’s product), QwillBot and Reword (paraphrasing and anti-plagiarism tools), GPTZero (AI detection platform), DALL-E (OpenAI’s free but for me, totally laughable AI art generator) and Wealth Management GPT (a new platform focused on supporting people in financial services). Through it all, I kept reminding myself to be open-minded and have fun experimenting.

For example, I needed to create a 60-second video script for a client. As a test, I prompted ChatGPT to create a compelling script for the voiceover talent, a woman with a bit of a British accent that we’d be hiring via Fiverr, to narrate some animated graphics. I took sections of my client’s website and pasted them into the “new chat” area on ChatGPT and stipulated that the script should be fast-paced and interesting to executives at financial services firms. It took less than 30 seconds to produce what I thought was a pretty good first draft. I touched it up and sent it to the client. He made a few more changes and it was good to go to the production team.

In another test, I used Wealth Management GPT to write a post for my company blog. I gave it the topic, length, intended audience, and tone of voice I wanted to see. I had a summary of a webinar that Fireflies had produced for me, so I also fed that into the system. Within a minute, I had the nascent beginnings of an excellent first draft. I repeated the test, going straight to ChatGPT this time, and returned something similar. I picked the version I liked best, fed it into Reword for suggestions, added my own spin, ran it through Grammarly, and the post was ready to publish. 

Then, one busy afternoon, I received a phone call from a reporter who asked if I'd send some comments to her regarding age and gender discrimination in the financial services industry. I asked ChatGPT to provide a list of considerations, massaged them to more closely align with my perspective and happily met the reporter's tight deadline. 

While I was in the ChatGPT platform, it occurred to me that I needed to create a family dinner potluck list, so I prompted the system, asking it to provide a spreadsheet with traditional summer picnic items for a group of 30 people, two of whom are vegan and to include quantities needed to feed the party. 

Once the AI generated the content, I copied and pasted it into a Google Sheet, added a column for family members to signify that they'd be bringing that item and then sent the Google link to the guest list – it worked like a charm. It took way less time than would have otherwise been the case.

For the first draft of this article, I used a transcript of the webinar recording, which I fed into Fireflies, producing a decent summary of the one-hour session. I then moved to Reword to source additional content and enrich the Fireflies summary. Of course, I then spent a fair amount of time making this article my own, adding my voice and insights – something that AI cannot (at least not at this time) do.

I’d heard about DALL-E, so I tried it to modify some photos I uploaded but found the output to be unbelievable (looked fake) and even a bit creepy (think “fake news” creepy). I gave up on it within 30 minutes and moved to Canva, where I had a much better experience replacing standard business backgrounds with surfboards and ocean-front tiki huts. I even added a parrot to my fellow panelist Charlie's shoulder, just for fun (he was amused, as he is a surfer).  

Of course, we can all probably agree that what people call “good writing” is good thinking and that “good design” is highly subjective – and note that in the tests above, I did not simply copy/paste/use and call it a day. As I’ve continued my experiments, it’s clearer than ever that human beings possess traits that AI does not. Nuance and discernment are at the heart of every good communication, no matter what form it takes – written, spoken, or visual.

Marie Swift is CEO of Impact Communications, a digital marketing and PR firm. She has written about and spoken extensively on all aspects of marketing for over 30 years. Swift is a member of the Action! Leaders Group.