Half the Financial Industry is Terrified of AI. Here's Why I'm Not

Half the financial industry is terrified of AI, while the other half is thrilled. Brendan falls into the excited camp - but with a major catch. Discover how he and Waymark are using AI as a powerful tool to serve you better, without ever letting a robot make the final call with your life savings.

Find out:

• How Brendan used AI to build a case against Verizon after six months of billing disputes

• Why AI Won’t replace you, and why someone else might

• What LPL's new Anthropic partnership could mean for your account

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_waywfc5mY

 Hey, thanks for joining me on another Coffee with Waymark. 

Well, I'm fresh off of a weekend at Palm Springs with LPL, and one of the big topics that we discussed was artificial intelligence or AI. I was able to spend a good amount of time with LPLs Chief Information Officer, who's responsible for all the technological tools that LPL puts out, and he was painting a vision of what AI will look like, because just recently, LPL actually made a partnership with Anthropic, which is the company that runs the chat bot, or the AI agent, I should say, called Claude. And it was really exciting for me. Certainly there were a lot of advisors out there that were really scared about what was gonna happen with AI and how that would change the world and whatnot, but what I always say to people is, I don't think AI is going to replace people just on the surface. What I do think, however, and this was definitely confirmed with my conversation with the chief information officer, is that you will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you do.

So what I thought I'd do in today's Coffee with Waymark is show you an example of where AI is right now. I think a lot of people haven't even tried exploring AI, or if they have, it's really just trying to ask a question to a Google type search on steroids. But right now, AI can do a whole lot more, and I'll show you an example.

So right now, I'm having a fight with Verizon. I've been fighting for over six months now. I traded in three different devices and I was supposed to get credits to offset the purchase of other phones that I have on my plan. 

So what I did here is, in this app, which is a Google app, it's actually Google NotebookLM, you can on the left side, add in all different sources you want the AI to look at. So in my case, I have my bill from July, my most recent bill from March, the different trade-in receipts that I was able to keep, along with a bunch of screenshots of chat interactions that I had with Verizon over the last six months where they'd promised me multiple times that they were gonna take care of it and don't worry about anything.

But six months later, it still hasn't been resolved. So I asked the notebook, “I've been battling with Verizon for over six months to honor our trade credit. What should I do?” And so you can actually see that it pulled information from those sources and pretty much said that, yes, I genuinely have a case.

Then it asks me what specific addresses, how much of a credit am I missing, what specific lines. So I actually asked, “How much of a credit am I missing?” It actually pulled that information, answered that question for me. But they missed something. They missed another $650 credit, so, “Please confirm.” Sure enough, it says that you were owed that.

So then I said, “Okay, there've been eight bills missing. What is the total credit I’m due?” So $611.12. And then I said the final thing: Taking everything into account and the fact that I've reached out to Verizon four times. Write me a letter that I can write to or I can forward on to the Better Business Bureau to actually get this resolved.”

And sure enough, here it is. 

All the data that I listed there, they pulled out from the sources that I had and put this letter together for me. 

So I think there are a couple learnings from this: One is that the AI bot, or the AI agent here was able to take all the data from that so they were able to pluck all the data. They actually answered some of the questions, but they didn't answer all the questions perfectly. And this is a very important part of what I think the future of AI is going to look like. It's going to be human-driven AI. In other words, you as a human have to actively participate in the AI query and not just let it go willy-nilly and do whatever it wants, or to write your thesis without your college thesis, without your interaction or your involvement.

What you saw was me having to redirect the AI every so often to try to get it to answer the specific question. Ultimately I got to what I wanted, which ultimately is, “Okay. What's the most compelling thing that I can say to the Better Business Bureau to get Verizon ultimately to honor the credits that I'm looking for.” That was the end game. 

But if I had just stuck with the first answer that AI gave me, we'd be in trouble. And this is a key piece to AI. There's a thing called inference. So inference is the decision making portion of AI. So take this one down. This is gonna be something that is a buzzword when it comes to AI: inference.

So inference is that you have these large language models, the Chat GPTs of the world, that have all this data on everything. When you ask it a question, it needs to take all that data and infer what you actually mean when you ask that question. What it actually is gonna need to think about. And I think this is what's gonna differentiate the different bots.

Right now, the AI agents that are out there are:  Chat GPT - Open AI has that one, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini and Elon Musk has a thing called Grok.

So all these bots out there, and they're all really good at some things, not so good at other things, but I think this inference thing is going to be the thing that everyone really hones in on to figure out which bots are the best. And that's the key right there, is how well will these large language models that have all the data will be able to answer the questions that you want it to answer. 

So, coming back to my LPL conference, how does this manifest itself moving forward? The Chief Information Officer told me that LPL has made an exclusive arrangement with Anthropic and Claude, and they're going to layer that on top of all the different systems that LPL has.

Now, rest assured that's not coming out anytime soon. They're making sure that all the data is airtight and that they create an environment where they can't have any kind of data loss, because there are 30,000 advisors like me, if even one of them goes off the grid and exposes, all the client information through this artificial intelligence agent, LPL will really have a big problem on their hands. So with that said, you probably won't see anything from an AI standpoint for at least the first year as they put the infrastructure in place. But moving forward, there are gonna be things that right now Brandon, Hanifa, and I have to do manually and the AI agent's gonna be able to do it.

So an example, pretty simple example, but still an example of what probably will be coming down the pike probably as soon as 2027. LPL manages our email server–so they can see everything. And that's intentional. They wanna see all the emails that you and I send together to make sure that I don't over promise anything, or if there was a complaint that it's acted upon, etc… So they oversee every email and they read every email. So since they have that system and they also have the trading and the brokerage platform, they can layer the AI on top of all those systems. And if you sent me an email saying, “Hey Brendan, we just moved from Massachusetts to Florida. Please update our address to 123 Main Street, Tampa Bay, Florida.” The AI could pluck that out, and then when I come in, when I come back to work the next morning, it would say, “John Smith looks like he sent an email at 6:00 PM and he wants to update his address. Do you want me to do it?” All I need to do is just say yes and that's it. And that's super exciting to us because that allows us to stop spending so much time on mundane things and actually get more into helping these models, and servicing you, and being that inference thing that we're all talking about.

Because again, what I would never do is allow AI to make decisions for you, because ultimately, you have hopes, needs, wants, desires. The whole reason why we go through the goals exercise is to better know you and what makes you tick, or the values exercise, what are the values that you use? And it's gonna be really hard for AI as we see it today, to incorporate all that stuff to just go out on its own.

So that's how I see AI manifesting itself in a lot of different businesses. I was just talking to a divorce attorney and I said, imagine that all of the things that your paralegal and even some of your associate attorneys, you could have AI do all that, but when it comes to sitting down with a spouse who may have been cheated on by their spouse and you have to take all that emotion into play and sync it up with the actual divorce and all the different things, that requires a human. I think we're far away from AI being able to play that role. 

Or another example, do we think that you know that there are gonna be more doctors or fewer doctors in the future? Because, guess what? AI is a perfect compliment to a doctor.

If you have a patient who comes in with all these symptoms, you can just simply talk to your AI agent and say, “These are all the symptoms. This is the age of the person. What are some of the things I should be thinking about?” That's great. But at the end of the day, again, you have to, as a doctor, take all your experience, all your medical training, etc... and take that data that the AI agent has given to you and humanize it.

That's ultimately what this is all about. In every science fiction movie, it's pretty much the same thing: the robots and the AI and the artificial intelligence, they know everything. They know every book in the library. They also, as they get into robots and things like that, they'll be physically stronger and more agile than humans.

But at the end of the day, we will always have the one thing that they probably don't have, which is the emotional part. And at least in many industries, that will always require human involvement. That is augmented by the artificial intelligence tools that they have available to them. So really exciting stuff.

I would urge people not to be overly concerned about AI. Obviously, like anything, there's certainly bad actors that can come in and use AI for evil. Just like the internet, look at the internet, back in the early 2000s we were thinking the internet was gonna shut down all brick and mortar stores because everyone would do all their shopping online. That didn't happen. 

Are there people that have used the internet for bad? Yeah, sure. All you need to do is look at the comments section of any posting or all the political debates that are going on, but at the same time the internet is indispensable these days. Literally, we cannot live without it. And that's how I think AI is gonna manifest itself. Certainly some bad things will come out of this, but at the end of the day, I think it'll do a lot more good than harm. 

Those are my thoughts on AI and where we are today. Super excited about it. Happy to be back in the office, and I really appreciate you joining me for this Coffee with Waymark, and I hope you be well and do good.

Brendan is the Managing Director for Waymark Wealth Management. He has extensive experience in comprehensive wealth management. His focus includes retirement planning, behavioral finance, investment portfolio construction, education funding, insurance & risk management, taxes, charitable giving, and estate planning. Brendan has an ability to take clients' complex visions and distill them down to simple action plans, helping them move from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.

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