There’s no nice way to say this: AI is coming for your job.
Previous milestones in humanity’s march from sticks and stones to bits and bytes reduced the need for physical labor. This time is a bit different. We aren’t talking about simple productivity multipliers like tractors or steam engines or even calculators; we’re talking about technology that can convincingly replicate the labor of people who have spent years or decades mastering their skills.
Not farmers, not factory workers, not even human calculators – you.
Many of us are going to go the way of John Henry, the legendary “steel-driving man” who hammered holes into rocks. He fought the mechanization of his profession with all the strength that he possessed, then died after a single and empirically pyrrhic victory. The rest of us will be the unsung operator of the steam drill that Henry barely beat – choosing to treat the technology like a tool, rather than a threat.
Current generative AIs are more like plagiarism machines than engines of creativity. They’re impressive, and they can do a lot of very interesting things. But they’re prone to repetitive phrasing and formatting, barely capable of going beyond surface-level observations and analysis, and distressingly willing to fabricate everything from sources to facts.
But this technology is in its infancy. John Henry wouldn’t stand a chance against modern drilling machinery, and there’s no reason to think the odds will be any better when we stack up against future iterations of the technology.
In other words, if you work with information, data, words, concepts, laws, or almost anything that requires a four-year degree, get acquainted with these tools.
Creating content with ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the most prominent generative AI on the market. And despite its slate of flaws, it’s more than just a robotic scribe that can assemble sentences in reasonably rational ways. It’s an AI powerhouse that can process complex financial data, understand context, and supply insights. Incorporating ChatGPT into your content-creation strategy isn’t just a good idea; it’s surprisingly easy to accomplish.
The first step is to define the type of content you want to generate. For instance, let’s say you want to produce and distribute weekly market commentary, client investment reports, or educational blog posts. Start by feeding it industry-specific documents to help it understand the language and context of wealth management, give it examples of your existing content to help it understand your style and diction, and have it reference specific documents or sources.
The more inputs and information you give ChatGPT, the more likely you are to get content that’s factually accurate and written in the appropriate voice. You’ll still need to enter a few more prompts to tweak it (or edit it yourself), and you’ll absolutely want to fact-check the output, but it won’t take nearly as long as it would if you were to write the whole thing yourself.
If you do this right, you’ll have about 80% of the necessary work done for you in a fraction of the time. The remaining 20% will be relatively minor tweaks and additions – the things that would usually encompass about 20% of your content creation anyway. The difference is that you’ll be spending at least 80% of your time on the final 20% of the work. In other words, not only will you spend less time working on content overall, but most of the time you do spend on it will be used on polishing and perfecting as opposed to gathering and arranging.
Baby steps
Don’t start down this path by entrusting ChatGPT with writing important content. Work your way up to generating critical client communications and producing commentary or blog posts, but start small. Start with marketing emails, video or podcast descriptions, social posts, and other short-form content.
Once you’re comfortable enough using ChatGPT, create the foundation of content that needs a personal touch. Instead of spending a bunch of time finding, aggregating, and organizing information, you can trust those (suddenly) trivial aspects of the work to the AI. Your job won’t be to gather and prepare the marble; it’ll be to get a chisel and sculpt the raw material into a shape that only you can make. That’s the ideal outcome: ChatGPT does 80% of the work, and you put your personal touch into that last 20%.
Read the Advisor Perspectives article here.