ChatGPT - Hot Or Not - Wealth Management Marketing
April Rudin
Will artificial intelligence take over key marketing and communication functions? Many of the enthusiastic articles and social media posts being written recently have suggested it could. The number of people checking out the capabilities of generative AI with bots has even flooded the system. The volume of users testing OpenAI’s ChatGPT have sometimes caused it to close down to any additional traffic.
If you haven’t tested it yourself, ChatGPT can generate content after receiving simple commands in conversational language. If you ask, “What are the advantages of contributing the maximum allowable amount to a 401(k)?”, for example, the bot will immediately generate an article that explains the benefits of investing all you can in a company-sponsored retirement plan.
To determine how to effectively incorporate this new capability into the marketing of wealth management, it’s important to understand the potential advantages and the limitations of generative AI.
Key Benefits When Properly Deployed
- Routine work can be automated. Bots can be used as a customer-service tool to generate communications or provide immediate responses to basic questions that have routine answers. A chatbot on a wealth management web site, for instance, could easily field responses to questions like, “What’s the difference between a traditional and a Roth IRA?” If an advisor wanted a series of social media posts on a topic like, “How to save for the high costs of college,” the bot could quickly generate posts for a campaign that could be run as is or perhaps serve as drafts for further refinement by the advisor or a marketing team.
- It’s fast and inexpensive. Generative AI can quite capably be used with the tasks that rank as the proverbial “low-hanging fruit.” Simple content needs can be generated in seconds, and the current version of ChatGPT is available for free from OpenAI. Later, enhanced versions may come at a cost.
MORE FOR YOU
$100M Magic: Why Bruno Mars And Other Stars Are Ditching Their Managers
Rebooting a $7 Trillion Economy
Today’s ‘Quordle’ Answers And Clues For Wednesday, February 8
- It’s a valuable research tool. Even if wealth managers and marketers need to refine the content that the bots generate, this capability can be helpful for research. It effectively scours the internet for relevant information on each topic. Seeing the content generated can serve as a double-check to make sure you’re covering all the relevant issues.
The Limitations of Bot-Developed Content
- It doesn’t reflect an expert’s insights or voice. Clients work with wealth managers because they value that person’s expertise and opinions. It could be easy to have a bot generate an article about how to invest during a recession, but it wouldn’t convey the individual insights and perspective of a trusted advisor. When relationships are strong, clients also highly value their advisors’ personality and temperament. Financial content can often be dry and boring, especially to readers who aren’t experts. Wealth managers whose personality and style come through in their blogs, newsletters and social media postings are far more compelling to read. You can’t get that strong, individual voice from a bot.
- It can be oversimplified, inaccurate and even biased. At least in its current iterations, generative AI doesn’t do well with content that needs to be complex and nuanced. For the moment at least, humans are often still needed to provide a quality control check. When the internet gets scoured by a bot for information that has been posted online about a topic, there is no human-like sensitivity to gauge whether the information is accurate, unbiased or even up-to-date with all the latest legal or regulatory changes.
- It’s not personalized. A piece explaining the benefits of maxing out your 401(k) to a general audience is easy enough to generate. But when a communication needs to explain to one person how much they should contribute to a retirement plan given their income level, investment temperament and long-term goals, people are still the best convoys of those highly personalized messages. Even if a bot can be used as a research tool for the communications, clients value the human touch. It’s one of the reasons why many tech-savvy Millennials still want to engage with human wealth managers and not rely entirely on robo-advice.
Finding a Balance Between Total Skepticism and Blind Faith in Tech
When it comes to any new technology, it’s probably best to avoid the extremes of being a Luddite-like resistor of innovation or a wholehearted enthusiast who embraces it with no questions asked. The best uses of generative AI in wealth management marketing are likely to come from those who are open to considering its potential advantages, while also recognizing when and where the values of human involvement, interaction and insights shouldn’t be replaced.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website: therudingroup.com
This article was originally posted at Forbes