The use of artificial intelligence could help advisers build their client bank to up to 500, according to Advisory AI co-founder Alan Gurung, who also thinks the technology could also help narrow the advice gap in the UK.
Gurung ran a financial advice firm for two years but sold it in 2022 when he was 25-years-old after noticing industry issues which he believed could be addressed through the use of technology.
He found the costs of hiring additional support staff to help scale the business could be very cost intensive.
Therefore, he decided to go down a different route in a bid to address the challenges he said he faced as an adviser.
Gurung said: “We spoke with 100 advisers and they told us 100 different things."
He found by talking to advisers that there were a whole host of challenges but one area which consistently came up was in report writing.
“Reports take four or five hours on average and the amount of time spent on writing reports is equivalent to around £2.6bn.
“We worked on this for 12-14 months on a model we have called Emma.”
The new tool is named after Gurung's first paraplanner when he was running his own firm.
He explained that Emma is a productivity tool designed to enhance rather than replace human advice.
The reduction in report writing time is about enabling advisers and their support staff to focus more on client relationships and complex planning work.
He added: “Right now when you are trying to write a report you have to read through all the things about a person’s life. You now don’t have to write anything, Emma can take on PDFs, Word documents and recordings. Now, for firms that use Emma it takes them 15 minutes.”
Advisory AI was co-founded with Roshan Tamil Sellvan and was set up in February 2023, before officially launching at the start of this year.
Before launching, the firm carried out tests of the technology on a small group of firms and next on the agenda for Advisory AI are two other tools which are still in the works and yet to be named.
The first is a model which is able to populate a CRM system with a recorded chat between a client and adviser. While advisers would be able to communicate with the second.
Gurung gave the example of an adviser being able to ask the tool how many clients had not used up their tax allowances and being able to break down this information further.
Gurung believes use of AI can reduce the price of advice and increase the capacity of advisers.
He said: “Right now, the capacity of an adviser is 100 to 150 and our ambition is to [potentially] get that to 500."
This is via his focus to help advisers serve more clients efficiently if they choose to, while maintaining high service standards.
“At the moment the advice gap means only 8 per cent of people get advice but we think AI could help get that to 50 per cent."
