Financial Advisors: How to Unlock Growth with Generative AI

Build your AI leadership muscle to identify and seize opportunities presented by the generative AI revolution.

Birju Shah is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Product Management and AI at the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to academia, Professor Shah was the head of product at Uber AI, where he led a team of 1900 that launched globally-used products such as kepler.gl. He also ran Uber Health, which leverages Uber's on-demand network to efficiently move people, workers, and goods to medical facilities with the goal of providing access to medical transportation to increase adherence. Over the course of his career, he has launched more than 10 products that have generated approximately $3 billion in revenue in the last decade. His current product focus is on machine data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence platforms for multiple consumer and enterprise use cases.

Each year, our SPDR® MasterClass program draws on the knowledge of specialists like Professor Shah to help advisors grow their businesses, keep pace with change, and better satisfy clients’ evolving needs.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), next-gen clients, and the ever-changing digital world are forcing advisors to execute growth strategies with more speed, tenacity, and data dimensions than ever. During a MasterClass session, AI expert Birju Shah discussed the power of generative AI in advancing growth strategies. Professor Shah helped advisors build their capacity to explore creative ideas and consider many possible solutions — all within the context of a highly regulated industry. Here we share key takeaways and strategies.

Explosive Momentum in Generative AI

We are in a period of remarkable convergence across several technological progressions. AI systems now outperform humans in capabilities such as handwriting recognition, reading comprehension, and language comprehension. Today, generative AI is reinventing major processes worldwide thanks to its ability to generate new assets and ideas. Generative AI fuels:

• Automation We can give software the human tasks that are tedious and couldn’t be automated before.
• Acceleration Generative AI can extract and index knowledge to shorten innovation cycles, enabling continuous innovation.
• Augmentation Generative AI enhances human productivity, helping us work more effectively.

Generative AI is here to stay, and experts believe this powerful technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and impactful. Advisors don’t want to be left behind — but they’re often unsure how to approach the AI landscape. The good news: A strong AI leadership mindset can help advisors take a broad view of generative AI opportunities, effectively use AI products to differentiate their practices, and build a competitive edge.

Steps to Develop an AI Leadership Mindset

Professor Shah identified the Double Diamond framework as a helpful tool for approaching the opportunities presented by generative AI. It spells out how advisors can apply innovative thinking, develop new operational concepts, and implement new strategies.

The Double Diamond framework is a visual representation of the strategic design and innovation process. First published by the UK’s Design Council in 2004, the Double Diamond helps leaders tackle complex topics by encouraging them to understand problems and explore creative solutions using both divergent and convergent thinking.

The Double Diamond framework organizes the design process according to two questions:

Are we solving the right problem?

• Diverge = Discover: Research topics, gather qualitative and quantitative data, analyze the problem space, adopt a customer-centric focus, and work to understand customer needs.
• Converge = Define: Synthesize themes, clusters, insights, opportunity areas, market fit, and “how we might” statements.

Are we building the right solution?

• Diverge = Design: Explore concepts by leveraging ideation techniques to generate an array of ideas and hypothetical solutions.
• Converge = Refine: Validate solutions through prototypes, tests, analysis, and refining; create final specs for implementation.

7 Habits for Success in the New AI World

As generative AI gains momentum, advisors can focus on key habits to build a foundation for success.

1. Be an expert. Know your product, your clients, your market, and your competition better than anyone else.
2. Be an owner. Take responsibility for the product and all related issues.
3. Be leveraged. Look for the 10X problems that can be broken down into high-value initiatives.
4. Be an engineer. Be curious about how the product is built.
5. Be a partner. When thinking of whole offer execution, build with to de-risk.
6. Be a cutthroat curator. Curate the best ideas from your team and celebrate the work of others on your team.
7. Be a fearless leader. Champion the problem more than the solution.

Amid the ambiguity surrounding the potential day-to-day impacts of AI, advisors can concentrate on one main job: Supply human oversight. Ground yourself by asking three types of questions about AI products:

• Behavioral Insights Does it feel good? Does the AI product experience provide a great experience for the user or my task?
• Value Insights Is this worth it? Does the AI product enable us to grow, execute faster, achieve some outcome?
• Platform Insights Does it scale? Once I have a lot of users, how do I scale with deflationary economics and the same experience?

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