Do Advisers Ignore AI at Their Peril?

Retirement plan advisers integrating artificial intelligence into their workflow is a matter of career survival, according to Jeff Cullen, CEO of Strategic Retirement Partners. Speaking at the PLANADVISER 360 Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Monday, Cullen cited previous research that there will be an estimated 1 million 401(k) retirement plans by the end of the decade. As the advisory field increasingly ages and retires, advisers face an ever-increasing amount of work.

The remaining advisers will “require a 2.5-times productivity in the next five years just to do the business,” Cullen said. “It’s really important that we understand [AI], embrace it and use it as fast as possible.”

Photograph by Anthony Collins

Cullen also made a prediction he thought “some people are not going to like”: Advisers will only stay relevant if they deliver increasingly personalized information about employee benefits to encourage client participation. He said only AI would keep up with that kind of personalization.

“If you’re still in that lane of being ‘the 401(k) guy’ or ‘the 401(k) gal’—in three years, it’s over for you,” Cullen says. “Where you need to direct your energy is being a total rewards consultant.”

He raised the example of an employee with a newborn child receiving personalized advice about starting a 529 tuition savings plan and considering more insurance, saying scaling that kind of individual analysis is not possible with traditional software.

Coming Around to AI

Given expectations that AI progression is the growth of traditional computing and approaching IQs higher than those of humans, Cullen said advisers who avoid or second-guess AI are “just going to shoot [themselves] in the foot and … not going to benefit the end user.” He said that concerns about AI “hallucinations” often stem from people not setting good parameters for where AI will get its data.

“If you’re going to let [AI] go scour the internet for every little piece of information—yeah, occasionally you’re going to get some really bad answers,” Cullen said. “If you fence it in and say, ‘Within this pool of data that we understand to be correct,’ it’s going to be right.”

He said he understands people get “antsy,” given the technology is moving fast, but he recommended that advisers who are getting used to AI should “just talk to it.”

“You don’t have to know how to code,” he said. “You can just have a conversation and have an intelligent conversation, which, by the way, is a lot of fun.”

First Step? Cut Down Email Fatigue

For advisers uncertain where to start, Cullen advised subscribing to a suite of AI-powered assistants like Microsoft Copilot to use in every aspect of one’s workday. The first item on the list: emails.

An AI “agent” can look at emails previously sent to a practice’s principal clients, sponsors and participants and automatically create drafts for new ones. Advisers’ edits to those drafts further teach the system, ensuring that automatic emails increasingly match expectations.

Cullen said his firm used Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry to build an AI agent that makes summaries of plan meetings and can generate even more technical emails, such as asking a recordkeeper to make an investment or asking a third-party administrator to make plan amendments.

“It used to take like three hours in the wake of a meeting—now it’s done in less than five minutes,” Cullen said.

With that kind of time saved, Cullen said advisers have shared many ways in which they are using their increased free time.

“Advisers are telling us, ‘I’ve never worked this little in my career,’ where they’ve got this huge book of clients, and they’re working 30-hour weeks,” said Cullen. “[They’re] playing golf more [and] spending more time with their family because AI is doing so much of their job.”