When Steven Chien first encountered generative AI a few years ago, he recognized it as the biggest innovation he’s seen in two decades as a strategic consultant and IT strategy leader. He realized, "This will help financial advisers be more productive, enhance how they serve clients, and even grow their businesses better."
So when he learned LPL Financial was looking for the right person to lead AI initiatives for its 29,000 advisors, he jumped at the chance. He’s now Head of AI Advisor Solutions at the firm.
In a new episode of the Box AI-First Podcast, hosted by Box Chief Customer Officer Jon Herstein, Chien shared his thoughts on how AI is transforming financial services.
This candid conversation unveils how LPL Financial is harnessing AI to empower its network of financial advisors, tackle the challenges of adopting AI at scale, and navigate regulatory compliance. The insights shared offer a compelling roadmap for organizations looking to embrace AI strategically.
Key takeaways:
- Generative AI presents a huge challenge — and also a huge opportunity — for financial services firms
- Financial services firms have a lot of unstructured data that, once unlocked, can be a real business driver
- Governance must be top of mind when instituting AI in the financial services industry
AI can help financial institutions overcome the “AI paradox” and redesign processes to take true advantage of the technology
The search for an AI platform to match scale to opportunity
LPL Financial is one of America’s largest and fastest-growing wealth management firms, serving 7 million households with $1.8 trillion in assets. The company’s enormous network of independent advisors hustles to meet the needs of clients every day. When generative AI entered the domain, Chien recalls: "It was both a big obligation, and a big opportunity.”
“We work very hard to find the tools that are most effective, comply with regulations, and come from companies well-equipped to serve a large scale of clientele,” Chien says. “When we get AI tools right, we can save advisers a lot of time — half an hour, an hour per meeting or more, a couple of hours a week — and that really adds up."
But AI technology is evolving incredibly quickly, and that makes the “build, buy, or develop” question a big one for financial firms. When Chien’s team first embarked upon AI initiatives, they thought they’d have to build their own tools. “But six months later,” he says, “it turned out we didn’t. Once we signed up for Box, we realized that Box AI and Box Hubs can do a lot of this for us.”
The opportunity within enterprise unstructured data
"Like most larger enterprises, we have a lot of unstructured data,” says Chien. “There's knowledge and insight hidden in emails and documents that we just couldn't get to before.”
Intelligent Content Management, which combines modern, cloud-based content management with AI capabilities and developer tools, has been the key to unlocking that data. “It’s a really exciting opportunity,” Chien says. “We’re working on building the right infrastructure across our data. By applying AI to it, we can find the nuggets of insights we know are in that data.”
One of the Box products that’s been especially helpful: Box Hubs, which allows teams to aggregate unstructured data so they can use AI to analyze sets of files at once.
For instance, Chien shared how LPL’s service and operations teams loads anonymized call transcripts into a Box Hub, then applies Box AI to pull out things like sentiment analysis and call drivers. They also take the next step of creating knowledge articles, based on the transcripts, to share how call center representatives solve problems for the advisors.
The company has also created a Go-to-Market Hub — their most used Box Hub. Here, new advisors and employees can get up to speed quickly, shortening the usual learning curve.
Governance and leadership alignment with AI
One enduring theme of this episode’s discussion is the importance of aligning AI initiatives to tangible business results. As Chien says, "If we can show a clear business benefit — helping LPL to be more productive, responding to clients faster — we can get a lot more traction."
But in the financial world, governance is a crucial consideration. Any tools Chien’s team decides to use must adhere strictly to industry regulations. As he says, “This helps advisers stay on the right side of regulatory agencies like FINRA and the SEC.”
Box, used by 7,000+ financial services customers, has built-in compliance controls for regulatory requirements including FINRA, GDPR, CCPA, and PCI DSS. The Box AI Principles further ensure that LPL has a framework for responsible, compliant use of AI.
Chien shares, "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. Fortunately, we were able to leverage what we already had."
Overcoming the AI paradox in the enterprise with agents
AI adoption has vast potential to transform enterprise organizations. Yet even though eight in ten companies are using gen AI, according to McKinsey, about 90% of the really impactful AI use cases are “stuck in pilot mode.” It’s the paradox of AI — “a lot of potential, but a challenge to get liftoff.”
You can’t just apply AI to your existing processes. Enterprises need to fundamentally redesign their workflows to unlock AI’s true value, and AI agents are going to be key to this effort.
A year ago, the idea of embedding an AI agent that could take action on your behalf seemed far off. Today, it’s a reality, and as Chien puts it, “The idea that AI tools can not only chat with you, but can actually autonomously make decisions and take actions on your behalf by calling different tools is really powerful. Being nimble and adaptable is going to be critical for anyone in this area. It’s going to unlock a lot of the ROI of AI.”
He continues, “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. AI agents offer a way to break out of the gen AI paradox.”
Catch the full episode
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