Not A Replacement
But still, even in world of digital advice, clients still want to engage with human beings, says McMillan. Morgan Stanley, for one, has no intention of replacing them.
“We fundamentally don’t think that’s the game we want to be in, nor should we be in,” McMillan says. AI and machine learning technology does things that are unique, he says, including storage and memory, things humans aren’t equipped for. “They are able to process millions and billions of permutations. They don’t forget things, they look for anomalies.” But humans are able to infer things from other people, read gestures and faces. “And they are able to contextualize multiple data facts and assimilate them in ways that [robots] simply can’t do yet.”
Hype aside, there is still a powerful gee-whiz quality to AI that allows the visionaries to come out, says Meghji, and there is lots of room for disruptors. He sees a big one coming in the insurance industry, which he says is a field about to be invaded by robots. Robo-platforms here will likely do the same things they do for investment platforms—finding not ETFs but insurance policies for people who need to be covered and have only to pop in their risk factors on their home computers.