AI will help solve the advisor shortage: Raymond James CEO Paul Shoukry

Raymond James CEO Paul Shoukry says that AI can help solve the financial advisory industry’s talent shortage, as the independent broker-dealer giant ramps up its own efforts around the technology.

Speaking during Raymond James’ annual institutional investor conference this week, Shoukry acknowledged concerns about AI solutions in the wealth management industry but reiterated the company’s commitment to the technology.

“I would tell you that the wealth management industry needs these AI-driven solutions to help advisors better serve their clients, to help advisors get both more scale in their business, to serve more clients and more assets,” he said, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript. At the same time, he added, AI is helping advisors provide more bespoke and customized advice and more holistic advice than they have ever provided before.

“So these AI solutions actually help the wealth management business evolve and providing more sophisticated holistic advice while at the same time, doing it for a larger number of clients. And that is required in the wealth management industry,” the CEO said.

Shoukry also pointed to last year’s report from McKinsey & Company, which highlighted the looming advisor shortage in U.S. wealth management. McKinsey estimates that, by 2034, the industry will face a shortage of about 100,000 advisors.

“If you look at the demographics of existing advisors versus new advisors getting into the business, coupled with rising demand for human financial advice,” he said. “And so, to solve that shortage, we need the AI solutions, which is why we're investing over $1 billion in technology and looking at all of these solutions going forward.”

As part of this push, Raymond James recently announced the launch of Rai, its proprietary digital AI operations agent, which harnesses natural language processing and generative AI.

“Rai is a large language model, generative AI, where we've taken transcripts from service calls and created essentially an agent where people can self-serve advisors and their teams can self-serve as client related questions that actually provide more consistent, higher-quality results,” Shoukry said. “It's much quicker in terms of being able to give you client-related questions at your fingertips.”

The CEO said that, while this effort is still in its early stages, it will be used much more extensively across the company. “Eventually, we're going to expand this to all of our businesses to ask questions about not just the client-related business but also ask associate related questions,” he said. “We're doing both internally developed AI solutions, but also looking to partner with vendors that provide specialty AI solutions.”

Earlier this year Raymond James’ Chief AI Officer Stuart Feld that the company has more than 10,000 regular users of conversational AI and that around 3.2 million lines of code are being created by AI every month under the oversight of Raymond James’ developers.

Separately at the investor conference, Shoukry also discussed Raymond James’ stance on cross-selling during the investor conference. “We have zero cross-selling requirements,” he said. “There's not one financial advisor that will tell you that they're - out of our 9,000 or so advisors, that will tell you that they have a cross-selling requirement to hit a deferred comp program goal.”

“We're very unique,” he added. “That sounds like common sense, that's actually pretty unique in the wealth management space.”

Last year Raymond James also announced a leadership shakeup to boost support for its advisors across its practice development offerings and investment solutions.