Nicola McKenzie, speaking at Legal & General’s 2023 Business Quality Awards
Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and has wide-reaching implications for the financial advice industry, but is change as simple as adopting new technology?
Dunham McCarthy co-founder Nicola McKenzie, speaking at Legal & General's 2023 Business Quality Awards (BQAs), said that while AI has transformed their business operations, implementing AI systems also posed challenges for the organisation, requiring them to lay the groundwork for change.
She highlights that Dunham McCarthy, which picked up the ‘Protection Written in Trust' award at the BQAs, has been leveraging AI to automate a significant portion of their administrative tasks, enhance service quality, and complement human expertise without cutting any jobs. However, it required a lot of back-end work to reach this point.
McKenzie explains that the hardest part of the integration process was not ChatGPT or the AI itself. The technology is inexpensive with businesses producing thousands of queries a month for only a few dollars. The real challenge was building systems to harness the technology.
To utilise the benefits of ChatGPT, Dunham McCarthy had to build a database enabling them to store 1,000 data points on each person versus the limited 30 or 40 that their existing system allowed. Due to their specific requirements, there was also no off-the-shelf solution available, which meant they had to build the database themselves. On top of this, they needed to build a system to produce documents from the data.
She says: "A lot of time has been spent making sure that our compliance letters etc are automatically generated. Those documents are not produced using ChatGPT but through using rules-based logic. Additionally, transitioning from a legacy database with limited data points to a new, comprehensive database demanded meticulous planning and substantial time investment."
Adviser businesses need to be deliberate with how they adopt AI technology - implementing AI alone doesn't result in the best outcomes for advisers and their clients. For this reason, marrying databases and AI with an accessible user experience is essential. McKenzie emphasises that human oversight remains necessary to verify and fine-tune AI-generated results, with both aspects complementing another.
She says: "I completely understand why people would see AI as a threat. But I strongly believe technology is there to complement humans - it's not there to replace us. Similarly, I don't think technology works amazingly without human input either."
McKenzie added that Dunham McCarthy plans to lean further into the use of AI. They intend to expand their hybrid approach, combining AI with human expertise to the legal side of their business. This includes producing documents such as power of attorney and pre-nuptial agreements.
She concluded her speech at the BQAs by saying: "I find it really exciting to see how artificial intelligence has become so much more sophisticated over the last 6 months. I think a lot of organisations are currently laying the foundations for change and it will be fascinating to see how the industry evolves as new technology is adopted in the coming years."
Legal & General's 2023 Business Quality Awards, hosted at London's Haberdashers' Hall on 17th May, celebrated the protection industry's advisers and businesses who have gone above and beyond to help their clients, delivering exceptional levels of customer service and retention of business.
