Brett King on the Future of Financial Advisors
“Alexa, buy 100 shares of Apple!”
“Alexa, can I afford this house?”
“Alexa, how much money have I saved for retirement?”
Whether it’s Siri, Google, Cortana, or Alexa, voice assistants have become ubiquitous companions in our lives. Today you can rely on them to tell you the weather forecast and kick off your favorite Classic Rock playlist, but would you trust them as financial advisors?
In Bank 4.0, Brett King, FinTech writer and co-founder of Moven, argues that AI assistants are poised to become the financial advisors of the future. Comparing voice assistants to autonomous vehicles, King contends that eventually the AI’s ability to synthesize mountains of data will drive superior decision-making and ultimately investment outperformance. I don’t think this prediction is extremely farfetched, but the timeline of 10-20 years that King provides seems a bit unrealistic.
Aside from their data-crunching abilities, the more interesting portion of King’s argument revolves around the personalization of AI assistants. Discussing the ideal future scenario, King explains how repeated interaction with your AI assistant will establish continuity and give the software important context for aiding your decisions.
“To become truly relevant and make an impact on behaviour, AI will have to become a day-to-day companion. It will have to be an entity that understands not only the client’s actions as inferred by location or spending patterns, but their intent, their overall emotional state and even their deepest secrets…”
As an example, imagine a situation where you are trying to save money for a lavish Hawaiian vacation next year. You can inform your AI of your plans, and it will help you meet this goal. A few months from now when you try to purchase the latest Playstation, your voice assistant will remind you about your vacation plans and warn that you may not be able to meet your savings goal if you splurge on this device. This is a stark contrast to traditional banking services today (ex. credit cards with airline miles) that actually incentivize frivolous spending.
“Her” (2013) provides some guidance on the benefits and perils of AI assistants
King also predicts that AIs will provide a level of abstraction away from our current financial dealings. When purchasing a house, you will not have to spend time comparing different mortgage offerings. Instead, you could simply ask your AI assistant, “How can I afford this house?” Conceivably, in the background the AI can conduct an auction with multiple banks and determine the best deal given your financial situation.
As the world trends more and more towards voice enabled technology, it’s not difficult to envision how embedded assistants can revolutionize our day-to-day financial transactions.