Are You Using AI?
The question started coming up about a year ago, usually at the end of a meeting, offhand, with a fair dose of suspicion. People have watched customer service disappear into chat windows and phone queues, and nobody wants their financial life handled that way. An honest answer is worth more than a reassuring one. The answer at Baldwin Capital is yes.
A nail gun doesn't decide where the wall goes. But it drives nails faster than a hammer. Somebody has to read the print, position the boards, and stand behind the work when the inspector shows up. That is how we use artificial intelligence tools at Baldwin Capital.
Our most notable use (pun intended) is taking notes. This is the least glamorous and the most valuable. We use a tool that sits in our meetings and turns them into notes, so nobody is splitting attention between the conversation and a notepad. If we have met on video recently, you have seen it. We say at the start of every meeting that it is running and are happy to turn it off.
The other use is research and preparation. AI can pull together background in a few minutes that used to take an afternoon. When a tax question comes up that we have not run into in a while, it can point us toward the answer, which we then confirm in the tax code. When we are working through a family's goals in WealthVision, it can surface planning techniques worth considering before we apply what we actually know about your family. We also use it as a second set of eyes, asking it to challenge an idea, argue the other side or find something we may have missed. Sometimes it gives us something worth considering. Sometimes we throw the answer away. As a small firm, that time matters. The hours it gives back go to a plan, a portfolio or a phone call.
None of that is advice. That is the work that happens before the advice.
There are places we do not take it. We do not hand a client's financial life to a general-purpose chatbot and treat what comes back as financial advice. We do not pool information from across our client families into an AI tool to see what it turns up. Two systems do work with client information. Jump takes our meeting notes, and WealthVision reads what a family entered before it suggests techniques. No AI tool touches client information here unless it is built for financial firms and contractually accountable for how that information is handled and protected.
Most importantly, we do not let it make decisions. AI does not know that your daughter is starting a business, that you and your spouse have been debating the same retirement date for years, the relief you will feel when you pay off your mortgage, or what it took to build a company from one truck and a phone number. It has never sat across from someone deciding whether they can afford to stop working. That conversation is the job. It is not something we hand to software.
And it can be wrong. Confidently so, which makes it the hardest kind to catch. It will describe a rule that does not exist, produce a number that follows perfectly from that rule, and summarize the document in a way that leaves out the part that would have caught it. That is why we treat what it gives us as a starting point, not an answer. A tax rule gets confirmed. A figure gets traced back to the source. A planning technique gets evaluated the way we would evaluate one from a colleague or a journal, just as it would have over the last five (or forty) years. AI can put an idea on the table. But it does not get to decide whether it belongs in your plan. The accountability for that decision sits with us, and no tool changes that.
Honest answer again, we do not know what this looks like in ten years. We are also not going to ignore it. So we keep testing it against one question: does this help us serve you better? Saving time and running the firm more efficiently matter when they help us do that. When they do not, the tool is just a distraction with good marketing.
The technology is not why you are working with us. You are here for our judgment, for someone who knows your situation, and for the person who picks up the phone. You should expect us to use good tools when they make us better at those things. Whatever we use behind the scenes, that part does not change.
We Enable Dreams.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.