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Thank you for joining me on another episode of RIA, a Collective.
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I'm your host, as always, Charlie van Derven.
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We're going in a little bit of a different direction with with this particular episode.
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Where those of you who have listened in the past, typically what we do is we're helping advisors transition into an independent space increase the trust in the industry, where I think that fiduciary role within an RIA certainly is impactful for some of the trust issues that financial services suffers.
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Today we'll go in a little different direction because I met a gentleman along the way named Sam Sova.
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Sam, welcome.
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Thanks for having
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me.
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Yeah, you got it, man.
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So Sam runs a a company called Subatomic ai, and from what I can tell, there's some tools out there in the industry.
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Of course, it's in its infancy but there's some AI tools in the industry that are doing some things.
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Sam, jump Zox.
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Those are, some of the call recording and CRM integrations that we see a lot of.
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You've taken it a little bit beyond, beyond what I'll call the tip of the iceberg with those tools.
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And, I don't know, from what I can tell, saving advisors hundreds of hours a year dozens of hours a month and meeting prep.
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That's an exciting use case scenario.
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And so I just wanna dive into that and, make our listeners aware of some of the front edge, front end tools that are out there, I should say, front edge tools that are out there because you guys are leading the way.
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Very much sam.
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Welcome, man.
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I do appreciate you spending some time with us and our listeners at RIA Collective.
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Yeah.
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Thanks again for having me, Charlie.
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Yeah, you got it.
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And we come from the same stomping grounds before we hit record.
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We were talking about cold, but Sam's in Wisconsin.
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I grew up in Wisconsin, so I don't think we talked about it, but maybe we got some Green Bay packer affiliation.
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Hopefully not Chicago bears,
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yes, absolutely.
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Packers
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all the way.
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Very good, man.
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Very good.
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I don't know if I told you on our call, Sam, I brought a packer player to third grade show and tell.
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I have a story for you too.
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I actually Ray Nitschke watched me and my friends in first grade play football.
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That's my story.
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Very cool.
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My first job outta a college, and we're gonna go quick through this 'cause I want to get into subatomic.
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My first job outta a college was at a Radisson Inn in Green Bay, which is where all the personalities in town would stay when they came for NFL games.
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And and got a chance to meet Ray Tke shortly before he passed away.
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And a whole bunch of Packer players and all the NFL people like John Madden and Pat Summerall that would come through town.
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And so anyway,
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love that.
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I was extremely starstruck.
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I think, I'd be more starstruck over that than than a Hollywood celebrity not Absolutely.
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It's just my bias in life.
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Awesome.
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I'm
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jealous.
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Yeah, man.
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Yeah, man, that's awesome.
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Let's jump in, man.
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Listen I I would.
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Say, what was it you?
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You can correct me if I'm wrong, but chat GPT launched November 22, I believe it was, might've been 21 if we've been using it that long, whatever it was by January, 2023.
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So a couple months later we were monitoring what that was all about and we started incorporating AI into social advisors, specifically content creation.
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Was the simplest way to jump into it.
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It changed the way I do business.
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It changed the way we structured our business.
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Here we are, three years beyond that.
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Sam, you've got your finger on the pulse more than I do.
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Dude, I'm stoked to hear about Subatomic and dive into some of the details.
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So how did you, first off, you I grew up in this industry, from doing websites way back in the day To where we are today.
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How did you choose financial services as where you wanted to stake your, stake your flag and jump in with an AI tool?
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Yeah, sure.
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So we started in 2023, and I have a co-founder, his name's Carl Simon.
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He is our CTO.
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And Carl was building complex projects.
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I was doing more of the consulting side.
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We come from the Fortune five hundreds doing the same thing, figuring out challenges, how do you solve 'em with technology?
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And that's really what we were doing at the early stages of ai.
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And what we found very quickly, you start talking to your network and your friends, and we found out that after talking to hundreds of leaders in this industry, there were common problems that we could really address with this long term.
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That were not just point and click solutions, right?
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Yeah.
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That were major pain points, not just for efficiency, but to really drive growth in an industry that is completely changing.
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So that's where we started.
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Very cool, man.
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I one of the things that keeps a lot of people out of financial services is compliance.
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And so I think we need to talk a little bit about that today.
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But before we dive in, what were some of those problems that you and you and Carl identified that you guys, were positioned to create solutions for?
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Yeah, at a macro level, when you think about technology, it was, Hey, we're experimenting with ai.
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But it's, it's just another tool to the tool set.
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So I have 15 tools I have to log into every day.
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Now I'm adding 16, 17, 18.
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The tools we have some AI capabilities, but they're just kinda wrappers on the current tool that we have.
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It's not moving the needle.
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They don't move they don't actually work into our workflows.
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And I just don't have this unified view of our data, which I feel, and this is comments we got, the people we talked to felt like that should be possible now with ai.
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So that's where we started.
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And then at a macro level, just 41%, it depends where you look, but the stat I have, 41% of advisor time is spent on tasks that.
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Quite frankly, we don't believe they have to do anymore.
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They need to be in front of clients.
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Yeah.
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And that is where the value is in this space is relationships.
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And that's what we've no questions over and over.
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So when we talk about growth, like what we're creating and what I'm gonna talk about further with you, Charlie, is really to break through that growth ceiling where we can do more with same, right?
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So we can grow without necessarily hiring incremental people to do backend work.
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Which I think is extremely interesting to all the RAs that we talked to.
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Yeah.
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I'm sure, man, and I we're gonna talk a little bit about meeting prep.
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Sure.
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I can only imagine, if you've got, 150 clients and pot, potentially that's 300 review meetings a year.
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One for just about every day when you pull the weekends out.
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Yeah.
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There's gotta be an hour of prep, whether it's assistant or the advisor themselves.
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Putting time into meeting prep, and I know we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about that.
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And just, in, in that, in that scenario, of course they've gotta review everything, so maybe it's 15 minutes instead of an hour, but in that scenario, you're saving hundreds, 200, 300 hours a year.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So let's you wanna dig into that?
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We can dig into meeting prep and some of the other things.
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Yeah.
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There, there's a couple things that I, I wanna make sure we talked about meeting prep.
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I also when we were getting acquainted you talked about the client or the prospect journey and, more touch points, but also more meaningful touch points, right?
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Based on who that person is versus.
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We do a lot of marketing automation, and in, in many cases, the message is the same.
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We segment people within that marketing automation, but if you fit in that segment, the messaging is the same for you as it would be the next person in that segment.
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So let's start with meeting prep and then we'll get into the more touch points.
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Yeah, and I can talk macro too, to actually, if you're okay with that.
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I'd like to start there on how we think of this and then roll in a meeting prop.
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Dude, it's
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Your time.
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So I, so we, just taking a step back, we think AI is almost at that 1995 moment.
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We talked about this a little bit, Charlie, right?
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Yeah.
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Like email come, comes up websites and like we when that happened.
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Nobody really had the context to what was going to come next.
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And what came next was dramatic, right?
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You had social media, you had the iPhone, Blackberry, you had different hardware and work changed forever after that, right?
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Yeah.
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I don't think anybody can argue that.
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Work and our lives change.
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We actually think the same thing with ai, right?
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So many people are thinking of this as just the next phase of technology of what they're currently doing, hence the wrappers.
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And some point and click solutions, like note takers, they're great, but that's not gonna dramatically change the growth trajectory of your IRA.
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So we think of this as like this is the pivotal moment that it's going to change.
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So what is the first thing you have to do, right?
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You have to unify our data.
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RAs in general have 15 different tools that they're accessing on a regular basis to get client information.
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So the way we look at it is you don't have to get rid of your tools.
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You already trust these tools a lot of them you need to use to make transactions and so on.
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So we orchestrate across all those tools, essentially create what those are familiar with of a data warehouse, data lake.
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Put a vector store on top of it, which makes it easy for AI to access.
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And when we do that, we have one view of our entire business.
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More importantly, one view of every customer.
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And now when you incorporate AI meeting prep you now have access to be able to do that in a matter of seconds versus ours.
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And that's how we look at it.
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We look at AI as.
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The fundamental thing you need to do is this orchestration and then the possibilities of what we do next to significantly grow the business is really endless of the possibilities we can do.
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That's pretty cool.
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So when we talk about tools, we're obviously talking about CRM, right?
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Yeah.
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Redtail Wealthbox and Salesforce derivatives.
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And then, for a lot of our clients they've got a client, CRM, and then they've got a prospect, CRM.
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Yeah, we are, we're a reseller.
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Go high level.
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But there's other, there's other good platforms out there portfolio tools, right?
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Orion and, black Diamond and these types of portfolio management tools.
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What else do you put in there?
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Custodial platforms.
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Custodial platforms,
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right.
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Email.
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Email.
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Most RAs have now dabbled with note takers, right?
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Yep.
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Client communications via email, RingCentral, if we're using that for text.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It goes on.
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The way that we've orchestrated this is like API connections are not good enough, right?
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Because if.
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Something on the endpoint changes or something with the host changes, like it breaks everything.
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So we, so I mentioned co-founder Carl, our CTO.
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His background is deep in data and integrations for the last 25 years or so.
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So like we built this platform knowing that.
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APIs weren't gonna cut it.
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So we have proprietary technology where we can use what we call AI coworkers to actually go in and get all this data in the platforms that APIs, F-S-F-T-P servers, et cetera, just don't get us to give that full view.
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And now we can pull it into one centralized area and orchestrate AI across that.
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That to us, that is the sweet spot where.
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Growth is inevitable for whoever does that.
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That's awesome, man.
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That's awesome.
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Yeah.
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So where do you wanna start?
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You wanna talk about meeting prep, you wanna
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talk about points?
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Sure.
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So like that example is great.
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We, in listening to the market, we know that meeting prep is just a complete time suck, but it's necessary.
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Yeah.
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So if you think about what I just explained of orchestrating all your data, so let's think about.
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Client, let's say Jane Smith.
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Jane Smith is in our CRM.
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We have emails, we have texts we have maybe some calls we've recorded.
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We have our custodial data and then all these other ancillary tools, Charlie, like you mentioned, right?
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So what we're able to do is take all that information and now create an agenda for a meeting.
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It can be anything that an organization wants from two pages.
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To 10 pages to visual.
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The output is now actually fairly easy with the AI platform that we built, right?
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Because we have AI building this, that can be done faster than ever.
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Yeah.
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We can do it in a dashboard, et cetera.
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But now what we can do is we can actually have one of our AI coworkers go in the calendars of all the advisors.
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And a week before the meeting, send all their agendas for them to review ahead of time and then collaborate with our AI team.
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We call it AI coworkers, to make any modifications right ahead of the meeting.
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Sync the data to be real time, and they walk into that meeting ready to go.
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And it's not just automation.
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What we're talking about is AI actually making recommendations of what you should talk about based on age.
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Maybe where they live.
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Maybe they're where they're at in life, if they have kids in college, things like that, right?
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So it's not just pure automation, it's actually having our AI coworkers think and make recommendations for us.
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It's pretty impressive.
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That's pretty awesome.
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And I'm sure, as with anything, when you've got human involvement there's even, even if a seasoned advisor or a seasoned assistant is pulling notes together, there's gonna be gaps left.
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Right?
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Based on their biases, based on things they're not even considering.
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Maybe they didn't look at the last three emails before they jumped into that meeting.
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That's pretty awesome, man.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And let me even paint a kind of a bigger picture of how we see the future, and these are things we're even doing today.
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Memory, right?
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Cognitive workflows.
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Maybe some of you that are listening have read about this.
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But we built this into our platform where it learns over time, right?
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So as you give feedback, as an individual advisor or a at a firm level, we can build that feedback and memory into.
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How we now give outputs in the future, right?
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So we like to think of this again, I keep saying AI coworker, like if you're gonna hire somebody right?
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As you hire them, you're gonna train them, you're gonna give them access to your tools and data.
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We think about the exact same thing with how we build our AI coworkers on top of your data.
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Yeah.
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And if you hire somebody new, you're going to give them feedback along the way, right?
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You're gonna train 'em up.
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Same thing with our AI coworkers, but they incorporate it super fast and we'll make the changes right away.
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And never forget the feedback that you gave 'em.
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That's that's pretty awesome, man.
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When you engage with an RIA Sam, what does that look like?