New artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT and others, hold great promise for aiding family office administration and decision-making. When new technology is developed, though, it’s not always immediately clear how best to use it. So how are family offices implementing AI today? Many, when asked, say they are not using it at all — yet. But some are testing the waters. Here is a sampling of responses from family office professionals about how they are thinking about — and currently using — AI:
“We write a newsletter every month to the family. I’ll say, ‘I need a two-paragraph article congratulating an individual on a community philanthropy award.’ It will write two paragraphs for me, and then I take it, add names, and massage it so it is more my words. It has cut the time we spend on that in about half. You do still have to go back and check everything, because a lot of it can be gibberish, and I have seen it hallucinate.
There are also aspects of AI that can be scary. I saw an article about someone who got a video call from the CFO at his company telling him to move money. He moved the money, but it was AI — it wasn’t the CFO. They stole millions of dollars from this company. That scares me. Most family offices are small — my CFO is not in a different state or country. But if you get into the fifth, sixth, seventh generation of a family and people are all over the world, who knows? You could think you’re getting told to do something by them. Family offices are going to have to change their controls around all of that.”
Jill Barber
President, CYMI Holdings
“We use AI in certain places. We’re fairly selective, because we want to make sure that we are looking at the data and analysis — a lot of our clients have very one-off, niche-type things going on. You need to make sure it’s done correctly, because it’s a complex transaction. We look specifically for where there’s data — a large chance of data errors and a large amount of data entry — and are trying to make that more efficient.
In our tax software, it lets us take all the tax documents, run them through a scan program and it pre-populates the return with standard W-2s, 1099s, all of that. We’ve taken that entry out of the staff — it’s being autoflowed into the return.
We try to implement it wherever there is something where it’s manual entry so that we can try to get errors out and get rid of that review time.”
Shannon Zur
Family Office Director, Vogel Consulting Group
“We are the most advanced in our AI strategy with our largest core business, Dot Foods. Our primary strategy is focused on using AI to improve our demand planning so we prioritize the right orders with the right customers to improve our service levels. We use bots to automate repetitive back office transactions at Dot Foods and continue to expand that use.
We are not ‘technically’ using it within the family office. We are investing in small startups that use AI to deliver technology solutions to large B2B businesses. We are also partnering with a company that uses AI to translate voice, text and email orders into a digital format, along with offering an ordering platform for independent restaurants.
One of the challenges associated with AI is sorting through those who claim to use AI and those that really have the technology to deliver solutions. Everyone wants to be branded as an AI company these days!”
Joe Tracy
CEO, Dot Family Holdings
