Warm personal introductions and the trusty steak dinner seminar will always be tools in an advisor’s prospecting toolkit. But increasingly, the process begins now with a prompt typed into ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot.
Stacey McKinnon, chief operating officer and chief marketing officer at Morton Wealth, and Matt Seitz, partner and chief marketing officer at Prosperity Capital Advisors, discussed this dynamic on the latest episode of Marketing Matchup.
The AI advisor competition is already here
McKinnon expects it will be commonplace to use an AI assistant for everyday questions, from an exterminator recommendation to a purchase, even more so than today. That habit eventually reaches the question of who manages a person's money. "How do you make sure that people make the choice to hire an advisor versus hire a bot?" McKinnon asked. "That's something that's really top of mind for me, that we're working really hard on."
The competition is already showing up in the market. "Claude and ChatGPT just came out with their new financial advisor abilities," McKinnon said. "They're marketing heavily that you can use them as your financial advisor. We have these tools that are marketing against us, but they're also the tool people are going to search for."
Seitz has watched that competition evolve in real time. Around the end of last year, clients working with Prosperity's advisors started running their own tax and planning questions through ChatGPT and Claude before checking in with a human. The answers were often wrong.
"It was hallucinating a lot back then," he said. "Consumers don't know any better. They were trying to do this, and they were believing everything it was saying." Six months later, the pattern reversed: instead of accepting flawed answers, the tools began sending complex questions back to a human advisor and asking whether the person wanted a referral.
McKinnon has a name for the moment that decides which advisor gets that referral. She calls it the "meet cute," the instant a prospect first encounters an advisor online, whether through a friend's recommendation followed by a late-night Google search or through an AI assistant's answer. Marketing's job, she said, is making sure whoever shows up in that moment is the version of the advisor a firm wants a stranger to meet.
The next referral might not come from a person
AI is playing an increasing role in that meet-cute moment. Prospective clients are already asking an AI assistant for a financial advisor recommendation before they ask a person they know.
McKinnon has already tested how that plays out. Her team ran a podcast episode comparing Morton's answers to a set of common financial questions against ChatGPT's own responses, then published an AI-optimized transcript of the exchange. A week later, the same questions produced answers that echoed her firm's language back. "I think the biggest opportunity today is optimizing your content and AEO strategy," she said, arguing that answer engine optimization has moved from a nice-to-have to a requirement for staying visible when the first search happens inside a chatbot rather than a browser.
Seitz has seen the payoff on the other side of that change. "We just had it happen twice last week," he said. "We got referrals, one from Gemini and one from Claude, from prospects who were trying to do it themselves. It eventually got so complex that it said, this is too complex for us, we recommend you reach out to an advisor." He credits some of that to AI providers adding guardrails around financial advice, and some of it to the ongoing reputation work his team has done to make sure Prosperity is the name that surfaces when that handoff happens.
Human judgment and engagement still plays a major role in courting new prospects. McKinnon's team replaced routine client check-ins with what she calls meals over meetings, a change that helped push client referrals from 30 percent to 60 percent of new business over three years. Seitz described a similar discipline on the front end of new relationships, training advisors not to move forward with a planning conversation until real rapport has been established.
Watch the full interview below, or download the latest episode of Marketing Matchup on the platform of your choice.
