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After joining Wells Fargo's wealth and investment management arm six months ago as head of artificial intelligence, Andre Mansour spent his early days at the bank playing a big role in the launch of its AI-powered chat capability, AI Teammate .
Mansour joined San Francisco-based Wells from tech giant Google, but 20 years ago, he was sitting across from clients as their financial adviser. He said he used that experience to mold AI Teammate into something every adviser and client associate across his unit can use.
"[Wells] has a very strong position on how to approach creating financial freedom for their customers, or growing wealth, or how to allocate assets. The tools that I'm building today are the ones to help surface that insight much faster to anyone, whether you're a veteran or a client associate who's spending more time doing the operational aspects of the job," he said.
The opportunity presented by AI is "vast," he said, sitting down with Banking Dive this week to discuss how AI Teammate has improved the WIM function, six months in.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
BANKING DIVE: What are the central issues in the WIM space that benefit from AI implementation?
ANDRE MANSOUR:The entire wealth investment management apparatus here is centrally focused on enabling the client-facing folks within our organization – the financial adviser and the client associate – who could easily spend a lot of their time clicking through frequently asked questions to gather information or building a deck to consolidate that information to present it to a client.
We spend our time focusing on those exact workflows and how to reduce the clicks, to reduce the time processing the information, and ultimately deliver the outcome, which is presenting an agenda, presenting a portfolio investment strategy or educating a client on a set of products or an investment thesis.
We focus most on reducing the time to deliver those types of insights.
How does AI Teammate help WIM support its clients?
AI Teammate, in a technical sense, is a model harness, and it takes all of our reservoirs of information and applications. Today, that's primarily in a tool called Advisor Gateway, which is a single platform with over 200 tools for an adviser to use daily. AI Teammate is an agent-based approach to creating an assistant that overlays Advisor Gateway, so instead of having to click through a number of different applications, they're able to use this conversational window agent to create some of those outcomes quicker.
We just launched this past quarter. We have had hundreds of thousands of interactions and a lot of things that used to take hours now are down to minutes.
What's something that used to take an hour that's now much quicker?
Meeting preparation is probably the most disrupted time save. You can take information investment research and then combine that with things like client relationship management system notes and to-do items, and say, "Hey, I'm prepping for a meeting with Mrs. Smith," then consolidating all of that information in a single prompt or two to create an agenda and approach before you walk into meetings. It used to take multiple hours sometimes to prep for those meetings, and now it can easily take a couple of prompts.
Tell me about a way that you've used it in the last couple days.
I like to use it for Darrell Cronk's Wells Fargo Investment Institute. They provide investment insights daily, and if I haven't read it for a week, I ask AI Teammate to summarize that information, so I understand the trends that the market has moved over multiple days, instead of clicking and pulling up each PDF from a day and reading all of that.
Does Darrell know you do that?
He's happy I do it!
You used to work at Google, which presumably is open and enthusiastic to novel technological change. How different is Wells' approach to using AI?
The intent and level of enthusiasm are the same, but the aim, outcomes, regulatory regimes and clients are different. At Wells, we intend to move with extreme amounts of speed, but never at the risk of safety. I'm constantly impressed by the focus on making sure that the client information is safe and the investment advice is within a set of guidelines that makes sure the outcomes for a client are the focus, not the technology.
There's this big wealth transfer on the horizon to millennials and Gen Z from their parents' and grandparents' generations. How does that impact the importance of creating the right tools in the WIM space?
When you think about the transfer of wealth to a younger generation, there are different angles of additional demand that we see. One is I only want to interact in a digital way, and then one is I'm going to interact with my own agent, but I am also going to have a financial adviser. We're approaching those two different sets of demand.
In the first one, we have already deployed a consumer AI solution, Fargo, which has had over a billion interactions thus far, and we are on a path of continuing to enable that channel within the WIM context, where things like interactions with your broker or account can be taken on through that channel.
On the other side, where folks are still meaningfully intending on using advisers, we're enabling those advisers to be a layer of approval to what individuals are getting from their own agents, so we empower our advisers with things like AI Teammate, so that they can both get the information faster and rely on the years of experience they have to help answer the questions that clients come to conclusions with their own agents for.
How does agentic AI change the job and purpose of a financial adviser?
The job outcomes stay the same. The goal is for individuals to be safely on a path to whatever investment objectives they have. Now, the information influx is definitely higher, so it's more important than ever for individuals to partner with a financial adviser to ensure that they're understanding the right products, services and path to those investment objectives.
Thankfully, tools like AI Teammate help the investment adviser provide more volume of insight than before because they're spending less time in the office.
Do you think the financial adviser role is at risk as agents get more capable?
There's nothing that replaces the number of years of experience, and the market iterations that these seasoned individuals have gone through.
I imagine a time when advisers will be able to be called into a client conversation – some major life event, maybe a death in the family – and they're able to be in those conversations fully immersed with the client, laptop down, because they're relying on a chief of staff who's monitoring their emails, monitoring the markets.
That chief of staff may not be a human anymore, but a fleet of agents looking through portfolio performance information, or understanding the household context, and then with the human, can use all of those proactive insights to decide where to go next. But most importantly, the adviser was able to spend time advising their client when they needed to.
