Elevating the Value of Advice: A Postcard from Our AI Journey

A year ago, I had a growing sense of uneasiness as I started thinking about planning for 2026. Business was steady but there was an eerie quiet, including clients we’ve served for years. We have a healthy portion of our clientele in the tech space, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what was going on – AI experimentation and adoption was undoubtedly the culprit – but knowing the source and speculating on the ultimate outcome are two different things.

Fast-forward a year: business is thriving, the opportunity pipeline is robust. The conversations with clients about AI, once guarded, are now transparent. We’re all using it, we all see its strengths and weaknesses, and we're all benefiting together. Internally, we got here by making AI a mandate for our team. We identified core areas where we could advance as a firm. We crafted a responsible-use policy to ensure we were protecting client information above all else. We networked with peers, evaluated models, experimented with applications, automated tasks, developed agents, and increased our productivity in myriad ways.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, and we’re nowhere near done. Not every initiative has borne fruit, some proved to be more daunting than we have time for now, others are still on the drawing board. But we’re much better as individuals and a team for what we have done, and have a good sense of where we want to go next.

There have been lots of learnings in this past year, with many more to come, but a few things seem clear:

AI has elevated the value of authenticity. Everyone knows when Claude wrote that “strategic plan” someone sent you. Everyone knows whether your writing is persuasive, filtered for slop and individual style. Everyone knows if you’re thinking for yourself, solving problems purpose-built for the client and delivered with sound judgment and conviction. Many people I talk to worry that AI will make people dumber and homogenize ideas; I see its proliferation as clarifying what's truly distinctive.

In our business, AI is about productivity, not replacement. This won’t prove true for every job, but it’s certainly true for an advisory business where experience, insight, and ideas are what pays the bills. Because of the work of my team and my own efforts to integrate AI into my personal workflows, I can do more and do it better than I ever have. For me at least, AI has upended the adage that old dogs can’t learn new tricks.

With productivity comes a demand for speed. Clients always want your best thinking, but now they want it faster. AI accelerates the table stakes research and helps set the context for creative solutions, leaving more time for answers. Many conversations I have with clients now go right to the point. The ability to think quickly and have the right answer has always been valuable; now it’s invaluable.

There’s lots to fear about how AI could ultimately shape our lives, but for our business it is an imperative. What’s most critical to me is how to harness its power while always building on what it provides, even as it gets better and better. In my world, humans cause complex problems, and those problems require nuanced solutions, forward thinking, and most of all client trust. Recommendations grounded in sourced research and trained agents are a good starting point, but for an advisory business that just scratches the surface. And clients can definitely tell the difference. Between now and the singularity, I’m looking forward to our firm doing our best work, with a boost from AI.