Checkout the second in the new Box AI first podcast series from Box Chief Customer Officer, Jon Herstein, with Steven Chien, head of AI at LPL Financial, highlights below.

Unlocking the Potential of AI: Strategic Insights from LPL Financial and Box

In the latest episode of the AI First podcast, hosted by Jon Herstein, Chief Customer Officer at Box, Steven Chien, Head of AI Advisor Service Solutions at LPL Financial, discussed how AI is transforming financial services. This conversation covers how LPL Financial is harnessing artificial intelligence to empower its network of financial advisors, tackle the challenges of adopting AI at scale, and navigate regulatory compliance. The insights shared offer a roadmap for organizations looking to embrace AI strategically.

LPL Financial: Scale Meets Opportunity

Steven Chien provides a great example through LPL Financial, one of America’s largest and fastest-growing wealth management firms, serving 29,000 advisors and 7 million households with $1.8 trillion in assets. Such scale represents both an opportunity and a challenge:"It's both a big obligation, and a big opportunity. When we get AI tools right, we can save advisers a lot of time—half an hour, an hour per meeting or more, couple of hours a week—and that really adds up."

From Curiosity to Leadership: Steven Chien’s AI Journey

The spark for Chen’s leadership in AI initiatives started like it did for many—a personal encounter with ChatGPT. He describes the moment as pivotal for realizing AI’s potential to revolutionize productivity: "I tried ChatGPT, like a lot of other people, in 2022, and I thought, wow. This is a really exciting technology."

His passion extends to enabling financial advisors to be more effective in client service and business growth: "This is by far the biggest innovation I'd ever seen that could help financial advisers to be more productive, enhance how they serve clients, and even grow their businesses better."

LPL has a tight feedback loop with it’s financial advisors, who operate independently. Chien described “Jump”, an internal AI  note taking tool which is tailored to financial advisors as being a differentiator for LPL in the market. Client meeting notes are sent back to a CRM and enables advisors to send a follow up to a client. This has helped make LPL an more attractive place for advisors to work.

Considerations around adding AI to the LPL tech stack. 

Regulation is a big consideration in financial services, and LPL needs to comply with regulatory requirements from bodies such as the SEC and FINRA. In terms of other risks which LPL thinks about, Chien touched on cyber security risks, the importance of ensuring models are not training on your data and hallucinations.

Another challenge is explaining the new technology, which many are not familiar with yet. The rapid pace of change is a challenge, for example with agents. “Being nimble and adaptable is critical to success” Another important consideration is scaling up to the increasing demand from LPL advisors for AI.

AI for Unstructured Data: Transforming Knowledge Sharing

One of the highlights in the episode is LPL’s approach to managing unstructured data. Jon Herstein prompts Chien to speak about the risks and rewards of unstructured data and how tools like Box serve as catalysts for AI adoption. Chien underscores the practical applications: "We have a lot of unstructured data. We know there's a lot of knowledge and insight hidden in emails and documents that we just couldn't get to before. Box is certainly one of the ways we're thinking about that...the ability to look at a whole bunch of unstructured data is an exciting one."

He illustrates the impact of Box’s AI and Box Hubs, particularly for knowledge-intensive functions: "We were showing internally, our service and operations teams how to throw a bunch of documents into Box Hubs...they could not only pull out things like the sentiment of the call or the call drivers, but even start to draft...a knowledge article about how the call center representatives were solving the problems for the advisor clients."

Change Management: Behavioral Shifts in AI Adoption

Rolling out AI tools involves more than merely deploying technology—it requires organizational buy-in and behavior change. Chien shares a blended adoption strategy, emphasizing that users initially treat AI like Google but grow to see its potential as a thought partner:"It's a combination of both for sure. We have found that simply rolling out tools like Copilot doesn't necessarily get you all the way. There's a behavior change with AI."

Herstein adds: "Finding a way to showcase some of these early examples of success...that's way more powerful than you telling them, you know, you should use this and here's why. They're hearing from others who are finding success with it."

Herstein continued: “People are finding, that it is the context that adds value to the queries, that is making a difference, we are seeing that in our Box Hubs product. Another area is extracting metadata from content, allowing people to analyze key points in contracts for example”

Benefits for LPL: Speed, Insights, and Collaboration

Box AI is also yielding advantages for LPL. Including the following:-

1. Prospecting and new client onboarding

2. Media and compliance review

3. Marketing content generation

4. Client onboarding checklists

5. Secure collaboration with external partners

Ensuring materials such as marketing materials, complies with regulations can be more automated now with AI.

Creation of marketing content is also easier. “Our advisors using AI, are the ones who are growing the fastest” said Chien

Other examples include advisors customizing Chat GPT to their own tone of voice and to their specific client, which creates a more personal experience for customers. Chien also highlighted the benefits of AI to onboarding advisors.

Competitive Advantage Through Governance and Leadership Alignment

One enduring theme of the discussion is the importance of aligning AI initiatives to tangible business results. According to Chien: "If we can show that it's a clear business benefit, helping LPL to be more productive, responding to clients faster...we can get a lot more traction if it is a clear alignment to a business problem."

Herstein emphasized the importance of getting compliance onboard in addition to leadership. Governance is equally crucial for ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. Chien explains the approach LPL adopted: "We had a pretty good technology governance process in place already...So we didn't want to rebuild everything from the ground up for AI. We'd certainly leveraged what we already had in place." LPL incorporated experts from across the firm, into the committees which evaluated AI tools.

Data and Compliance Challenges

Most firms didn’t organize data for AI pre 2022 and compliance is also a challenge. It is important to build mechanisms to hear from AI partners, who are rapidly adding new features, and testing of the governance is important. Advisors have freedom to use their own tools. Advisors love to hear from other advisors in terms of savings and benefits.

Jon Herstein highlighted benefits Box is seeing from AI.These include better research around customers and tailoring messages to customers, to deliver a more personalized experience, plus improved onboarding of new employees. Herstein cites Box’s transformative impact on onboarding within the company: "One of our most used hubs at Box is our Go-to-Market Hub...for someone who's new, you can get them up that learning curve much, much more quickly."

Chien echoes this excitement with examples from LPL’s operations where time savings and efficiency improvements in onboarding and other processes, compound organizational success.

The Promise and Challenges of AI in Enterprises

Chien spoke of the potential of agents working with other agents, this will help organizes generate ROI from AI. Chien referenced McKinsey’s report on AI which underscores the vast potential of AI’s transformative capabilities, particularly tools that move beyond automation and into actionable insights. However, as Steven Chien wisely observes, bolting AI onto existing processes is insufficient. Enterprises need to fundamentally redesign their workflows to unlock AI’s true value: "Just bolting on AI at one end of a process isn't going to fundamentally accelerate that process. Companies need to redesign their processes from the ground up with the idea that AI is available."

Ability of AI to deliver a more customized service is another area of opportunity.  “Eliminate, simplify, then automate” said Herstein, describing a great approach to maximizing the potential of AI. Chien compared AI to the advent of electricity, in that it opens up new ways to think about existing business problems.

Final Takeaways

“We need to be adaptable” Chien referenced building an in house tool to parse large documents, then realized Box AI provided the same feature.“The question of “build or buy or partner” will require a nimbleness which we didn’t have before” added Chien “The pace of innovation is really impressive” - said Chien

Herstein referred to the fact that Box is allowing customers to switch between models to avoid being locked into a single model. Jon spoke about three considerations for the impact of AI in customer success and asked Steven how these applied to LPL. 1) Value realization, 2) change and culture, 3) experience for end users.

Chien focussed on these impacts in the context of LPL:

1. Value - advisors saving time and providing more personal service

   1. Experience - alot of tools emerging, LPL needs to curate tools for its advisor network “As AI Notetakers become more prominent, we see more tools, not sure how this will play out. Advisors will look for a tool to bring it all to them”

2. LPL has a great feedback mechanism from the advisor network. 

Call to Action

If you’re ready to explore AI’s potential for your organization, start by testing thoughtfully, aligning technology with business needs, and empowering stakeholders. To dive deeper into these insights, subscribe to the  AI First podcast

Finally, a question for the Box Financial Services Community

How does LPL’s journey compare to yours…are you using AI for business processes such as client onboarding and marketing content creation, and do you have feedback or questions?  Please comment on this post!