The vast majority of asset and wealth managers say that AI is a high strategic priority this year, which isn’t surprising. What’s noteworthy, however, is that communications and messaging have emerged as their leading use case. In fact, more investment managers (30%) say that’s where they’re generating the greatest value from AI, ahead of research (20%), marketing and sales (15%), and data synthesis (14%), according to a recent survey by the Money Management Institute.
This isn’t the first time that a transformative technology has promised to disrupt financial communications as we know it.
During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, I was seated on the other side of the table as a financial journalist, and every story I wrote started the same way: by picking up a phone to speak with a portfolio manager, economist, or analyst, and then trying to determine who actually had something new or thought-provoking to say. When the internet took off and the volume of financial communications exploded, it made my job both easier and harder at the same time.
The easier part grew out of the technology itself. As more and more earnings releases, corporate announcements, and regulatory filings were made available online, decades of financial history became instantly accessible and searchable. On the flip side, when so much financial information becomes available to everyone everywhere all at once, how much value could a journalist add? It turns out, quite a lot. As my colleagues and I quickly learned, when the volume of information swells, human judgement becomes all the more valuable.
Fast forward to today. I’m no longer a journalist. I work in financial communications, supporting the investment management firms that I used to cover for an agency filled with former reporters. Today, it’s AI that threatens to transform how business is conducted and content is created.
That’s already happening. A recent analysis by the AI-detection company Pangram found that 41% of LinkedIn posts and 31% of Medium articles 250 words or longer are fully AI generated. And there’s nothing wrong with that. AI is an immensely valuable productivity tool that allows financial firms to produce commentaries, insights, and marketing materials with incredible speed and sophistication. But the fact that so many investment managers are using AI to generate content means there’s a strong likelihood that the advisors, investors, and journalists they’re targeting are also likely to use AI in their daily lives. Therein lies the problem: One recent study found that people who use ChatGPT for their own writing are extremely adept at detecting AI-created content, introducing a level of skepticism that content producers must overcome.
With the abundance of new financial communications in the age of AI, authenticity is now as valuable to companies creating content as judgement was to my fellow journalists in the dotcom era.
Where does that authenticity come from? It starts with the messenger. Ghost-written content can absolutely amplify your message, but it only works if there’s a baseline level of trust in the people delivering the message. Thought leaders can continue to build credibility through interactions with reporters. But today, they can also convey their authority and authenticity directly to their targeted audience through less filtered means, such as videos and podcasts.
AI can absolutely help hone and echo your firm’s messaging, but it still takes a human to deliver that message credibly and persuasively. And it still takes humans to put those messengers in the best possible light.