Quick summary:
- Financial advisors spend over half their time on administrative tasks rather than serving clients. AI changes that
- AI agents work in parallel — like having 50 skilled interns simultaneously handling tasks from news monitoring to portfolio analysis
- The technology enables advisors to profitably serve younger clients and mass affluent markets that were previously too expensive to reach
Mark Gilbert watched financial advisors drown in paperwork for years. Meeting with a client meant four hours of preparation pulling data from scattered systems. After the meeting came another three hours updating CRMs, filing forms, and opening accounts. When clients emailed a week later asking to move $8,000 for a car down payment, advisors burned another two hours hunting through systems to figure out the best account to pull from.
The actual advisory work — understanding goals, explaining strategies, offering guidance — consumed maybe an hour. The rest was data entry, form filling, and system synchronization that advisors universally hated but couldn’t escape.
Gilbert built Zocks to eliminate that imbalance. On this episode of The Disruption Is Now, the Co-Founder and CEO tells host Greg Matusky how AI agents are compressing workflows, enabling advisors to serve clients they previously couldn’t afford to work with, and fundamentally changing what financial services looks like for advisors and consumers.
Watch now:
Key takeaways
AI alters the client meeting cycle by eliminating back-office tasks
Financial services operate under crushing administrative burden. Regulatory requirements, compliance standards, and fragmented systems force advisors to spend most of their time on tasks unrelated to helping clients.
“Every time that they’re intaking a client, there’s often multiple accounts,” Gilbert explains. “They’re having to look across a whole bunch of different things. They’re then looking at all that and putting plans together for you. Each one of those systems requires a lot of data entry.”
With AI handling data aggregation, form completion, and system updates, that eight hours shrinks to roughly 90 minutes. An hour of that remains the client meeting itself, which advisors actually want to spend time on. The AI eliminates what they hate.
You’re thinking about AI agents wrong
Most people think about AI assistance in singular terms. What if you had one really good associate helping you? Gilbert argues that’s the wrong framing entirely.
AI agents work in parallel. You can deploy 20 or 50 simultaneously, each handling specific tasks. One agent monitors news for mentions of clients or their companies. Another tracks portfolio holdings and flags when bonds mature. A third scans personal updates from conversations to identify life events that require financial adjustments. A fourth analyzes external market conditions against internal holdings.
These agents also collaborate. When Zocks fills out a form requiring a client’s address, multiple agents search different systems simultaneously. One checks email. Another queries the CRM. Others scan previous conversations, planning systems, and custody platforms. If they all return the same address, the form auto-completes. If they find different addresses, another agent evaluates which is most current based on timestamps and context.
The multiplication effect changes what’s possible. Advisors can monitor dozens of data points per client that they’d never have time to track manually. The question shifts from, “What would I do with one good intern?” to “What becomes possible with 50 working in parallel?”
Mass affluent clients finally get sophisticated services they couldn’t access before
Financial services has always operated with clear wealth tiers. Ultra-high net worth clients received estate planning, tax optimization, and comprehensive wealth management. High net worth clients got most of those services. Mass affluent and younger clients received basic portfolio management because anything more sophisticated wasn’t economically viable for advisors.
AI collapses those tiers. Services previously reserved for clients with $10 million now work profitably for clients with $1 million. Estate planning that required multiple specialist meetings can be delivered through AI-powered systems that integrate directly into advisor workflows.
Gilbert sees firms connecting Zocks with estate planning platforms like Vanilla and tax systems like Holistiplan to create comprehensive service packages for clients who previously couldn’t afford that level of attention. The clients prefer this because they avoid getting handed off to multiple specialists and repeating their information. Advisors benefit because they can charge more while delivering services that cost less to provide than traditional models.
The accessibility extends downward too. Advisors can now profitably work with 30-year-old clients who have $100,000 saved. That client might become a multimillionaire in a decade, but traditional economics never allowed advisors to invest time in the relationship early.
The transformation happened faster than anyone predicted
When Gilbert started Zocks in the early 2020s, the team projected certain capabilities would take four to five years to develop. Automatically filling out account opening forms. Updating financial plans from conversation transcripts. Negotiating with vendors on behalf of clients.
Those features shipped in two and a half years.
The acceleration continues. Gilbert sees the next six months focused on assistant models that free advisors from remaining manual tasks. But the real shift will come from rethinking what’s possible when you have 50 intelligent agents working simultaneously at near-zero marginal cost.
The financial services industry has started that conversation. The firms embracing AI most aggressively are redesigning their cost structures, expanding their addressable markets, and offering services that weren’t economically feasible before. The laggards are discovering that their competitors can now serve clients faster, better, and more profitably.
Key moments
- Financial advisors spend over half their time on back-office work (1:00)
- The eight-hour client meeting cycle before AI (5:57)
- Capabilities arrived faster than expected (14:52)
- Why 20 or 50 AI assistants change the service model entirely (17:59)
- Making young professionals and mass affluent clients profitable to serve (22:01)
- How robo-advisors helped human advisors instead of replacing them (25:41)
- The shift from task automation to workflow redesign (31:36)
- The challenge of growing the next generation of advisors (35:00)
- The importance of domain expertise (36:50)
Q&A with Mark Gilbert, Co-Founder and CEO of Zocks
Q: Will AI eventually replace human financial advisors?
A: Not for a long while. I think it’s going to play out a lot like robo-advisors. When robo-advisors emerged, many people thought this marked the end of traditional advisors. Fast forward 10 years, 15 years, and that’s totally changed. Most advisors have a robo-advisor and use one.
I do believe that people will come out with almost like a consumer-led, AI-based financial advisor service. It will probably appeal to people in their twenties and early thirties who are just starting to build and frankly need relatively straightforward advice. And then as they grow and ideally grow more and more wealth, the human starts to get more and more involved.
Q: How do you train junior professionals when AI eliminates the grunt work that used to teach them?
A: Financial services traditionally trained new professionals by assigning them administrative tasks. Junior associates spent years processing paperwork, updating systems, and handling routine client requests. This grunt work was exhausting, but it taught fundamentals through immersion.
AI now handles most of those tasks. Firms no longer need eight junior associates to perform data entry because AI processes it automatically. This creates an efficiency win but eliminates the apprenticeship model that built expertise.
I believe that organizations must intentionally create learning opportunities rather than relying on osmosis. Junior professionals must develop domain expertise even when they’re not performing the manual tasks that traditionally built that knowledge. The curiosity that drives people to understand how things work becomes more critical when the baseline work no longer requires human effort.
Q: What’s the most important mindset shift for understanding AI’s impact?
A: Stop thinking about what AI helps you do faster and start asking what becomes possible now that wasn’t before.
Are there a different set of clients, maybe earlier or smaller, that we could start working with? Are there new capabilities we can offer that just weren’t feasible before, whether that’s for helping out the advisor and going straight through to the client?
When you can assist the advisor in such a strong way that it frees up valuable time, you’re making the existing business model more efficient, and you’re unlocking entirely new business models that weren’t economically viable before.
