An assistant that answers advisors' questions from the firm's own records

Situation

Advisors and operations staff moved between the CRM, shared client folders and spreadsheets to answer everyday questions about clients. Preparing for a client review meant reading months of notes, finding the notes from the last review and gathering the details of the client's accounts. A question about the whole client base meant filtering spreadsheets by hand.

Solution

A desktop assistant answers questions that staff type in plain English. Its answers draw on the firm's client records, documents and account data, and it supports three kinds of work.

• Review preparation. An advisor names the client and receives a summary of key client information, recent notes and open follow-ups, laid out like the firm's own review notes.
• Questions across the client base. Staff can ask, for example, which clients hold a particular fund or which reviews are past due.
• Saved templates. Recurring requests are stored as templates, so staff do not retype the same instructions.

Design decisions

Jeff Hunt designed the assistant to read client records without changing them. The one addition it makes to the CRM is a meeting note, and only after the advisor confirms it. Figures such as investment returns are calculated by ordinary code, and the AI writes only the commentary around them. The numbers therefore come out the same every time.

Outcome

Advisors can prepare for a client review from a single summary of the client's records. Staff can answer questions about one client or the whole client base without moving between systems or filtering spreadsheets by hand.