Guest: Jeff McMillan, former Head of Firmwide AI at Morgan Stanley and founder of McMillan AI.

In a nutshell: What might a great wealth management firm actually look like in 2030?

As AI continues its rapid evolution, the financial services industry is rapidly moving beyond basic notetakers and chatbots. We’re entering an era where AI agents, advanced data orchestration layers, and hyper-personalized reasoning models will  transform how financial advice is created, delivered, evaluated, and consumed. Leaders need to wrap their heads around what’s truly possible when AI is integrated into every system of an advisory firm.

On today’s episode, Jeff McMillan and I crack open a “time capsule” from an advisory firm in 2030 and attempt to map out the territory between what AI will be able to handle and where the human advisor will still be able to provide meaningful value.

.Jeff McMillan and I discuss:

  • The 2030 advisory firm: what’s plausible and what’s science fiction (for now)?
  • The current state of AI adoption across wealth management and why excitement is still accompanied by strategic confusion.
  • The AI data advantage (large firms) versus the AI speed and adaptability advantage (smaller RIAs).
  • Using AI to achieve a deeper level of plan personalization.
  • The looming commoditization of standard financial plans and why advisors must expand into broader life coaching and professional services to protect their fees — and their value.
  • Moving from modeling money to modeling lives and leveraging AI to solve client problems that firms previously lacked the resources to tackle.

Jeff McMillan on the state of AI adoption:

“There’s a lot of excitement and a lot of confusion. We were early at Morgan Stanley. We were the first customer of OpenAI, and most firms that I work with, to include ones in the financial services and wealth management space, are still trying to figure it out.

“I think there are two tensions going on. I don’t think anyone is of the view that this is the next Metaverse — there is real conviction behind this. But organizations don’t move quickly. If you’re a CEO, a leader, or even a practitioner, you’re stuck between wanting to move quickly but also wanting to move responsibly. Candidly, the most significant challenge is education. The number of leaders I talk to who are using this technology beyond planning their next trip to Florence is, candidly, quite small. The best way to learn is by doing and getting your hands dirty. Wealth management as an industry has potentially the greatest opportunity for disruption or the greatest opportunity for long-term value, and it’s going to be a function of the advisors and leadership of these firms to figure out which direction that goes.”

Jeff McMillan on using AI to scale your client base and your service:

“The single most powerful driver of economic growth for a financial advisor is how many outbound phone calls they make in a day. That was true fifty years ago, and it’s true today. My best advice to advisors is : make more phone calls. The problem is that advisors don’t have enough time to make enough calls. When the market drops 20% in a single day and you have two hundred clients in your book, you couldn’t make that many calls, and not many of those people would pick up. You need a combination of human engagement and digital engagement. The scaling opportunity for advisors is using this technology to increase the velocity of client contact. Because that is the number-one opportunity and  that’s the number one challenge that advisors have.

“When you call that client, you want to be  relevant. AI has an incredible ability to not just offer this to you because you’re a thirty-five-year-old woman living in the Midwest, but because you’re ‘Steve,’  and I know every single thing about you because I’ve worked with you for 15 years, and I’ve recorded every single meeting that we’ve ever had, and interactions and emails. I know about your family. And that’s what builds relationships. The constraints are putting this technology in the hands of hundreds or thousands of people in a controlled, responsible way. Because the problem with this technology is it behaves more like people than it does like technology. It’s like you hire a really smart college graduate that is a CSA on your business tomorrow. They know a lot of stuff and they probably can help, but you better check their work. ”

Jeff McMillan on why thinking bigger is “what really matters”:

“I think we get lost in fees and pricing and products. A I will make your account opening process faster. It’ll make your portfolios much quicker. It will help you invest. But I think that is, like, 5% of the opportunity.

“The opportunity is the idea that somebody listening to this podcast is thinking about right now, that for 30 years they couldn’t do anything with, because they didn’t have resources or time or budget. And this technology is democratized so much now that the art of the possible — we have to think bigger. We have to think beyond the current frame of what a financial advisor does, and think about how do we help our clients solve the problems that they have, as opposed to, I run money and I help you invest. I think the opportunities for growth are just astounding, and I am actually pretty bullish. But there will be winners and losers, and the winners will be the ones that think differently, and the losers will be the ones that don’t.”

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