AI and the Meaning of Money with Mark Casady

Sean Walters: Hello everyone, I’m Sean Walters. Welcome to The Exceptional Advisor podcast from the Investments and Wealth Institute, premier professional association for the wealth management community. Each month I sit down with leading thinkers and practitioners to talk about what’s going on in the advice profession, what’s next, and what you can do with it. Today’s conversation is about the future of wealth management and AI — the role that AI might be playing in that, and what advisors might do about both. My guest has had a front-row seat to most of the changes in the profession the last 30 years, and he’s spending most of his time these days thinking about what the next change is. So welcome, Mark Casady.

Mark Casady: Thank you, Sean. It might be more like 45 years, but let’s not be quibbly over that.

Sean Walters: I’m trying to keep you in your 40s and early 50s there.

Mark Casady: Wish you could. Maybe AI will be able to do that. It’s just a matter of time.

Sean Walters: Yeah, with two avatars talking to each other. So Mark, in case you don’t know Mark Casady: he’s former chairman and CEO of LPL Financial — led that firm for more than a decade, took it public. Now he’s co-founder and general partner of Vestigo Ventures, and he’s executive chair at FMG and on the board of Savvy Wealth, an AI-native RIA. Part of the reason we wanted to invite Mark today, outside of his extensive knowledge of all things AI and advice, and the podcast that Vestigo and his team does with Peter Diamandis: he co-authored a piece for us in our most recent Investments & Wealth Review issue on AI, “Apocalypse or Renaissance,” and I really liked, Mark, what you had to say in that. So we’re going to talk about a few things that were in that article. Before we jump in, I always like to ask our guests — since we’re a professional community of advisors, and associations are about people — who helped you get going early on in your career? And what did they say or do that moved you onto the path of where you are today?

Mark Casady: That’s a great question. For me, there are two key people through my career in wealth management. The first was in the first decade of my career, which was at Northern Trust in Chicago. I was going through the trust program, where you actually spent two years learning everything you need to learn about administering a trust, investing the trust, understanding fiduciary rules and those things. And the gentleman who was the chairman of the trust company was just this very elegant figure who, you can imagine, knew all there was to know about families and family dynamics and the way wealth helps or hurts those families. So he was very influential in the early part of my career as someone to look up to, admire, revel in his intelligence around these issues and his ability to really get people to listen — which is of course a key issue in wealth management.

And then the second person was at a company called Scudder, Stevens & Clark, which actually wrote the book on fiduciary management for a fee. They created, in the 1930s, the first account that was essentially what we know today as an SMA. They did it for the local Fed chairman, and they wrote the book on investment advice for a fee. It still exists today — I have a digital copy of it, because it’s just so interesting to see. And the logic was, the chairman of the local Boston Fed said: look, right now you’re selling me bonds. You’re a bond sales house. So we’re on opposite sides of a transaction. Why don’t you join me on this side by putting together a bond portfolio, but then charging me an ongoing fee? Like — earth-shattering, what an idea. And that’s what they did, and they created a really interesting firm as a result. When I joined it in the mid-90s, the chairman of the company then, Dan Pierce, who’s unfortunately now passed away, told me: to be in this business, you’ve got to have the mind of a capitalist or an economist and the heart of a social worker. And that has just resonated with me forever as a lovely way to think about our profession.

Sean Walters: Yeah, that’s really a mix of skill sets. And you’re right, we’re going to get into some of that when we talk about the meaning of money. I’m sure over your years, you’ve been an inspiration to so many advisors, kicking them down this profession or gently nudging them in this direction.

Is There a Financial Advisor Shortage? Why the Gap May Be 300,000

Sean Walters: Let’s talk a little bit about the profession and AI — let’s dig in right there. There’s around 300,000 advisors, give or take, depending on who you ask. McKinsey Consulting, early last year, came out with a report saying there’d be a shortfall of advisors. There’s been some questions around that — some have said that McKinsey article is more just trying to sell consulting services into big firms to help address this shortage. And some people think it might be the opposite: there’s actually too many advisors today, and we’re going to go more the route of insurance and have fewer advisors in the future. You, on the other hand, have taken that and said the McKinsey shortage is insufficient — there’s actually room for more advisors than that 100,000-person shortfall. So what do you think about this gap, and why would the gap exist? Explain that to the listeners, and how it will need to be addressed in the future.

Mark Casady: Happy to do that. My view of this comes from the large business we had at LPL around supporting both insurance-based broker-dealers and financial advisors — RIAs as well as supporting banks and credit unions. When you went in to measure their ability to cover just their existing clients, they were woefully short — like four or five times short of what they really needed to have. So if you had 50 people, you might have needed 200, 250 people to really cover just what you have existing in your footprint at Local Bank X. I was struck by that. And what it told you is, if you have a smaller number, you become transactional, and you aren’t engaged in real advice and counsel — you’re essentially performing a transaction of one form or another. So you can see the missed opportunity immediately when that’s the case.

In working with independent financial advisors, they tended to be correctly staffed, if you will, for the business they had at hand. But what they didn’t have was an organic growth strategy beyond the references that naturally come in, and beyond the natural predilection of these businesses to go up and to the right because of markets — they’re a diversified portfolio, and they get more valuable over time, as all diversified portfolios do. So it’s pretty easy to build up your business and then kind of enjoy it and enjoy your clients and not need to do much more.

But the reality is, if we look at what’s the opportunity: despite ourselves sometimes, in this country we produce an enormous amount of wealth. Enormous. By far the largest economy, by far the most creation of millionaires. If you look at any studies recently, there’s lots of concern about the concentration of wealth — I understand that. But the reality is what we’re really seeing is an incredible lift out of poverty into affluence, from affluence into early upper affluence or high net worth. In other words, you’re just seeing a money-making machine that is the U.S. economy. It’s our entrepreneurial spirit, it’s our ability to do things, get it wrong, pick ourselves up and go get it right. And I see it every day in what I do now in venture, which is constantly creating winners and losers in the space — and the winners come away with significant personal wealth, as measured by anything.

So I look at that and I think about what advisors are typically able to cover, and say: we’ve got a shortfall that’s not at 100,000 — it might be 300,000. We might need to double the industry to do what we need to do. But we need to do that in a certain way. We can’t just say, let’s have more people and it’ll all be fine. They really do need to think about financial planning and counsel, and the emotional parts that come with money are really critically important in that.

Sean Walters: So walk me through how you see the business model or the industry makeup for, let’s just say, a doubling of the number of advisors. You worked with a broker-dealer that supported the independent side; you’re of course familiar that about half of the advisors out there are more employee-based. What does that look like in the future? And this kind of gets into one of the questions I had about the RIA of one that we’ll talk a little more about — but how does the business model expand and catch that growth?

Mark Casady: So, a few things. Most of my early career was in the employee-based model — the first 11 years at Northern, where we’re obviously all employees of the bank and in a fiduciary trust role, kind of a unique business model in our industry, but one that’s very powerful and very personal in terms of advice and counsel. Then I switched to the asset management world, and then came back to the advice world through LPL — but, as you say, on the independent side. So I’ve seen the wide range of businesses, and I think in the end that doesn’t matter. That’s just a structure. Either I feel comfortable taking out an office lease and figuring out payroll and doing those things that feel more entrepreneurial — and frankly more administrative — that have to be done, or I’d prefer to be in an employee structure that allows that world to go away. One of the interesting things is my successor at LPL built the employee model they have today, called Linsco, as a way to just say: pick your flavor. Which one do you want to have as a business model?

So let’s leave the business model aside. The core of advice, in the end, is about really helping someone think through their choices with the amount of wealth that they have. And it’s as important to me if I have a million dollars and I make a hundred thousand dollars as it is if I have a hundred million dollars and I make two million dollars a year. The issues are really the same. Now, the ability to affect them is different, but the issues are the same emotionally. And that’s really the missing gap here: there’s just a lot of people who don’t have access to, or can’t get to, an advisor who can really get to know them, get to know their family, get to know their situation, and provide them that insight and advice. If we had more individuals who could do it, you would see more uptake among — let’s just keep it concentrated to the U.S. — among U.S. consumers.

You’d also start to cover the parts of the market that financial advisors really stay away from: those who are near-affluent and probably have some form of workplace savings, but don’t really have much in the way of personal assets — maybe some home value. That’s very tough for an advisor to make a living on, so they avoid it. That’s a natural way to go about it. But if you had more advisors, you’d figure out ways to make that segment of need covered. And this is one of the promises of technology — to make all that less expensive and more possible. So there’s just lots of places to go in terms of market share and places to provide advice that we just haven’t gone yet, because generally we have a structure that has a certain cost to it and a certain way of doing things that won’t work within those markets.

Last example I’ll give are HENRYs — people who are just starting out their career, they’re high earners, that’s the H-E, but they’re not yet rich, that’s the rest of the acronym. I think it’s kind of a charming term, because I have a grandson named Henry, so I like that. What’s interesting is you’ll hear plenty of advisors say, no, I’m really focused on the HENRY market — but they actually only have like 5 percent of their entire households in that market, or 10 percent. There are a lot more people who are HENRYs, particularly in the millennial population these days, that really need advice and could set themselves up to be in much better shape financially if they were getting that advice now, in their 30s, than they will when they get to their 40s or 50s — when they have enough assets to be interesting to the industry. So imagine a world in which we could cover those and still make a living. We have to make a living; we’re economic animals. And that’s going to be an important change versus where we’ve been historically.

The Meaning of Money vs. the Management of Money

Sean Walters: So it sounds like — and this is a good bridge to the second question I have for you — in order to handle the rising demand for advice and counsel on financial matters, more of the advice profession is going to be focused on the meaning of money and less on the management of money. That’s something you’ve talked a little bit about — maybe talk a little more about that. And give me a concrete picture: if you’ve got a team of advisors all working around clients, how does that look on a Tuesday afternoon meeting with a client?

Mark Casady: There we go — that’s a good place to imagine ourselves. So, I’ve loved the term “meaning of money versus management.” I’ve said it till I’m blue in the face over the years. I need to trademark it, perhaps. But I don’t, partially because I don’t think it’s trademarkable, and partially because I want the world to think about it this way. What does this mean? The best financial advisors at LPL that I would speak to would say: on that Tuesday afternoon, I spent two hours with my client, and we spent an hour and 45 minutes on the dynamics between the husband and wife as the wife or the husband retired. They’re at that stage of now enjoying the fruits of their labor, and the dynamics of their relationship have changed dramatically. And they feel so comfortable with the financial advisor, they’re actually talking to him or her about it and getting advice — from other couples that have been similarly situated. That might be the Tuesday afternoon.

It might be parents who are doing well, with children that are five, seven, ten, thinking about college planning on that Tuesday afternoon. A key question: are you going to pay for the child’s college? Are you going to help them in some way? How are you thinking about these issues? Obviously the earliest you can start with the child is as they’re born, but most people don’t tend to do that — they tend to think of it as they get to early double digits. So if I can just get you to awaken to the fact that we need to think about this issue and have a family philosophy around college pay, that would be important. There’s definitely people we all know who would say, I’m not paying for my child’s college — I had to pay for my own, why would I do that? Somebody else might say, I’m going to pay for part of it, but I’m going to make them pay 20 percent of the college costs so they get a sense of the value of money. None of these are right or wrong — they’re philosophies.

Or I might say — in the case of my wife and I, we said we’re going to pay 100 percent of our kids’ college, because we had to put ourselves through school and it was hard. We paid on our student loans for a decade after college — and remember, this is the ’80s, so it’s a long time ago — and that just seemed like an enormous bill back then, relative to a young family trying to get started. So for us it was: we’re just going to remove this obstacle. We want them to go to great schools, we want them to not think about this aspect. And then we want them to focus their money on our grandchildren, doing the same for them — let’s teach them how to do that. So that’s a family philosophy. That’s the way we operate our family. There’s a series of rules that go with that, on the Tuesday afternoon, that they’ve learned over the years.

So it’s really about getting that couple or that person or that family to discuss what’s important to them in the area of their wealth, or their aspiring wealth, and then living that philosophy cleanly. Because the problem isn’t the management of money — we know how to do that. It’s very easy to manage a portfolio in most cases. I don’t want to take away from those who are really wonderful at finding excess returns in public markets — they exist. But the reality is, getting someone into a diversified portfolio is fairly straightforward. So sitting down with me on a Tuesday afternoon and telling me how my portfolio is doing — if that’s more than five minutes, I’m not interested in having that conversation. What I am interested in is understanding: how is our family doing? How’s the philosophy around our money management? How are we thinking about or anticipating issues that may be coming up, like the cost of medical expenses in retirement, or whatever else the topic might be? The more the advisor can get engaged with the family around these broader issues, the more they become part of the family — and the more they become a trusted advisor, which is what you’re really after in the relationship. Not somebody who is just a provider of a return.

What a Great Advisor Looks Like in Five Years: The RIA of One

Sean Walters: In some of my discussions with other association professionals — those professions that have a counseling or empathy or human dynamic to them tend to be a bit more, let’s just say, AI-resistant. Those are the characteristics that AI is, at least today, having trouble replicating. And the meaning of money certainly fits within that. Having a partner who helps you with judgment, rather than an interface with the internet that helps you with more information — so that you ultimately have to make a decision alone — that’s what gets challenging for a lot of young professionals thinking about what they want to do in their careers. Where’s my unique place in all this? So — this podcast is called The Exceptional Advisor. When you think about what you just described, and the first question we asked about whether there are too many advisors or not enough: five years from now, let’s say a client calls you as a friend and asks what they should expect from a great advisor. How would you envision that, Mark? What does that advisor look like?

Mark Casady: I think that advisor exists. There are definitely some who believe they don’t — that they will actually go to their favorite large language model, ChatGPT or Claude, and ask Claude the answer to the question they’re thinking about. And I’m certain people will do that, in much the same way we’ve searched the internet when our knee hurts and asked why — so I can be better informed when I go talk to the human about what my options are.

As I think about what that looks like in five years’ time, I love this concept of the RIA of one. That effectively, I have such an efficient infrastructure that I work with that I am totally focused on my emotional connection — my EQ interaction with my clients — as opposed to my IQ, or as opposed to the administrative process that this industry is great at creating. We all know that you should be putting so much away into an IRA or some other retirement vehicle. We know there’s paperwork to be done when you want to gift money to a child. Five years from now, that will all be automatic from a discussion we had together, the client and the advisor, and the machines will take care of it. That’s the beauty of AI. And it won’t seem odd in five years’ time, because we’ll be so used to it as consumers, starting in our life of buying things — our favorite thing to do as humans, buy stuff.

In the next year, we’ll have examples where an agentic solution — bot might be another word — allows you to buy the thing that you buy regularly. I use the example of Brooks Brothers shirts. I’ve worn them since I was a little boy. They’ve gotten a little bigger over the years, I’ll say that. But I have to remember what my inventory is, and about every six months I have to go order a half dozen or a dozen to replenish my closet. Everyone does it. I don’t tend to walk into a store, because I don’t happen to like to do that — though I could do it that way too. That won’t be true in another year. I’ll have some sort of solution — offered by Apple as part of my Apple Wallet, or by Google as part of shopping, or by Brooks Brothers — that says: let’s just understand what your inventory is, then automatically deal with these things for you, and let me give you parameters to set from there. That’s where we’ll first experience it.

So now imagine five years from now, you’re having a conversation with your advisor. You’ll already know where your portfolio is. You’ll know how you’re doing against your goals. That’s the easy part. But what I won’t know is how I’m feeling about all that, and the issues I’ve faced in the last year — since I sat down with you, in the last six months — that I need help with on the EQ side. I’ve got a child who’s in college, and they’re learning these amazing new skills, and I bet I’m worried about them for this reason. What are ways to help them? So I think you’ll imagine an infrastructure in which you don’t really need a lot of humans around to do the administrative part, and you really can focus on helping someone understand how they feel about, and how they think about, their money philosophy — their meaning of money for their family. And again, it doesn’t matter the number of zeros; the issues are really still the same, in my experience of working with individuals on their financial planning needs.

The other thing is we’ll have a much better array of tools — much better ways to understand how you think as an individual. Today you can scrape my LinkedIn and my Instagram and you can know that I’m a fact-based buyer. So if you want to try to sell me something or talk to me about an issue, let’s start with some facts. Somebody else might be an emotion-based processor, so we need to start with: what’s the story, what’s the heart, how do we get to those issues? In five years’ time, the advisor will know that about this client or this prospect, and be able to be more effective in connecting with them, human to human. That’s what I think happens in five years: the AI takes care of the drudgery, and we take care of the emotional part — which is just critical to getting right for humans.

The Turbulent 20s: How AI Reshapes Entry-Level Work in Wealth Management

Sean Walters: Well, that’s my last question, related to that time horizon — five to seven years. You made a comment in the article — I don’t disagree with it, by the way. I heard a term in 2020 painting the decade as the turbulent 20s, and that has certainly been the case. We’ve still got a few more years left in the 20s, and maybe a few more beyond that, before AI gets super-intelligent or whatever. So this rough-and-tumble period of the next five to seven years — in the article you said you wish you could kind of Rip Van Winkle your way through five to seven, wake up and see what has emerged. What does this next five years look like? What makes it rough and tumble? And what should advisors and firm leaders be bracing for, or preparing for?

Mark Casady: It’s a great perspective. Of course, none of us know what’s going to happen. One thing I have proven to myself over the last two years of watching generative AI play out — remembering that we’re sitting in a shop where we’ve invested in AI as a technology since we opened eight years ago, but before, it was predictive AI, the kind we all know about from the Turing machine and those things, and then generative AI being the newest appellation — the reality is it’s very hard to predict timelines, and very hard to predict outcomes, because this technology is so amazingly fast. I will say it’s going faster than I would have guessed. I just finished a conference at MIT — 250 speakers, amazing situation, put together by Imagination in Action, a nonprofit — essentially a deep immersion in AI of all shapes and sizes. Highly recommend people going; it’s typically in the spring at MIT’s Media Lab. For me, that was a moment of going: my gosh, I’m sitting in a lab where I see this every day from startups, and yet look how much faster this is all going.

So five to seven years feels like a long time from now. But we know a few things about this technology. One is, it does menial tasks pretty darn well in white-collar work. And that’s what’s different from previous revolutions. The Industrial Revolution took about 100 years, and of course it was labor in its purest form. Yes, the world was better because the loom made the fabric rather than the human — but the reality is, getting from here to there was pretty rough. And you had 100 years to get there. Even if you said it was really more like 50, you still had 50 years — two generations. The problem is, this is going to be a half-generation, a quarter-generation skip to the new world of highly automated white-collar work.

And that’s scary, because we graduate students today to learn that white-collar work — if we focus on that population, they come out of college ready to be taught, almost in apprentice style, what it is they’re going to do in wealth management or asset management or chemical engineering, whatever it is. So the more technical you are early in your career, the better off you’ll be, because that will give you a niche to work in — where the human interaction and thought process, even in five to seven years, will still create innovations and ways to think about things that are unique versus the LLMs, which are an accumulation of human knowledge over time. The way I do it will change. In the past, I’d do 100 experiments to try to find something that worked. In the future — and even today — AI can do 100 experiments virtually and tell you where to focus. But you still get to focus on something.

So I think the turbulence comes from, effectively, the hollowing out of entry-level jobs that can be better done by the technology that is AI. That eliminates a group of people who otherwise would be climbing the ladder toward whatever it is they want to do. It’s that first decade of work that is particularly worrisome for me. After that, you become specialized enough, and there certainly will be new jobs to be done as well that will consume the labor we have available at sort of ten years out of experience. But we have to get through that period and understand how to retrain people. Some, for example, should go into vocational jobs — I don’t see a robot yet able to do my plumbing. It’ll take a while. So that would be an area where someone might specialize. For a while we’d say: no matter what, go into computer science, be a CS major anywhere. And now people would say, don’t do that — the computers will do programming. They will. But understanding the mindset of programming is still going to be very valuable five or seven years from now.

What’s really important is for you to follow your passion. What’s the thing that most excites you about the work in front of you? In financial advice, it might be exactly this issue of the meaning of money. It might be the social worker part of the job, or the economist part of the job. If that’s what ignites your passion, do that — because there will be places for you, because you’re bringing the best thing you can do to that situation, and you will likely be a high performer. Somebody who’s not happy in a job, somebody who’s just getting by — that’s a person who’s going to have a real struggle in this next five to seven years. So awaken your passion first, would be my advice to someone who’s entering college or just coming out. And then secondly, try to get as many reps in as you can — through internship programs in college, or even if you have to do internships post-college. Those reps matter, and getting that experience matters a lot.

We’re going to have to, as a society, figure out how to deal with some of the dislocation before some new roles start to show up. But on a positive note: I sit in a space in which there are 150, soon to be 300, jobs that didn’t exist a year ago. So I can tell you there is new employment being created. And not every one of those people is a brilliant scientist from MIT’s CS labs — many are, but at least a third are folks who came from schools like I came from, Indiana University, who did well in school. I wouldn’t say I was academically brilliant by any stretch of the imagination. But if I found my passion — it might be sales, for example — I can do that in an AI startup. There’s definitely new employment occurring. I would encourage people to look in that space, because the sooner you can acquire the skills around how to use AI in any profession, the better off you’re going to be.

Sean Walters: I think that’s great advice. One thought on that: as a credentialing body, we do job analyses for investment managers, private wealth advisors, retirement advisors — that’s how we set our exams, and that’s how we then set the curriculum. CFP Board does the same approach; they added client psychology several years back to the body of knowledge after a job analysis. It’s been the same path for us. Family dynamics, for our Certified Private Wealth Advisor certification, has just doubled in terms of the number of exam questions we ask on it — because it’s such a bigger part of a wealth advisor’s job, navigating the family dynamics, which get quite extensive as wealth increases.

Mark Casady: It’s more complex — just like taxes are more complex when you have more wealth. But again, the need to understand the emotion and get engaged with the client really works at all levels. So that’s fantastic that you’ve added such an emphasis to those skills, those EQ skills.

Sean Walters: And I think it emphasizes your point that the role is no longer just managing money. It’s all this other stuff. As the profession grows, more skill sets are going to be needed within the practice, within the team, to support different types of clients.

Mark Casady: They will. I think it will tend to emphasize that the advisor has to have those as part of their work, because there won’t be other work to do. Typically today we might have a paraplanner who does the actual machine work — putting together the details of a client’s financial situation and running the software to get to an outcome. That will be done by agents; that won’t be done by humans. So the paraplanner could move to being the emotional counselor alongside the advisor — that would be a role that makes sense to me, in much the same way a nurse practitioner sits alongside the doctor. I think we’ll get new professional designations that are about that support system, that would look a lot like what you might see in psychology or in the medical professions.

The example I use in medical: in five to seven years, I’m certain a robot will do my knee replacement. That doesn’t surprise me at all — it’s already doing a fair amount of it. But I’m going to want to talk to the human before the robot gets in there. I’m going to want to understand what really happens. Give me that look in the eye and tell me it’s okay — because I’m going to need that in that moment. And I think most people do. They need that human connection to make it make sense. And again, the more complex their knee situation is — or their wealth situation — the more they’re going to want that human connection.

How Advisors Should Start Using AI Today

Sean Walters: Just the last question, then, before we close: any piece of advice you’d give to advisors today?

Mark Casady: First one is to really try to use these tools yourself, and ask your team to be using the tools. A simple way to do that is just give them an institutional version of your favorite — for some people that’s ChatGPT; for most people today in business situations it’s Claude, from Anthropic. But give them one, and importantly, institutionalize it so you can protect the data — because you don’t want PII going into the system and being learned by the machine. You can do that. And if you don’t, the problem is your staff is going to use their phone, and they’re going to ingest the data you have in order to do their job easier. It’s just the way I’ve, unfortunately, seen this over and over again. So give them a safe environment to really practice their AI skills — and do that for yourself. Spend a half an hour a week; it doesn’t need to be more than that. Try to learn some basic programming on Claude, or get better at prompting for information. A lot of people do it, but I’m often surprised by how few people are willing to try it. It’s safe. You can do it. It’ll be okay.

And then, for financial advisors, I think you’ve got to find the right partner in this journey who’s got the bigger technology for your office understood — which is what drew me, in our investment portfolio at Vestigo, to Savvy Wealth. They’re an AI-native technology stack, one of only two in the industry, and that gives them an enormous advantage. They already have examples of advisors who are doing investment advice with no staff, up to about $300 million of client assets. They’re not bigger than that, but that tells you the direction they’re headed. It’s also why I joined FMG as executive chair — because you can see so many wonderful things that can be done with AI in that environment. Not to plug those two companies specifically, but more to say: as an advisor, look for partners who are forward-thinking and really trying to help you in that environment. LPL certainly is doing a great deal in this space, as are many others in wealth management. So look for that right partner, because this is going to take time.

And then also accept that we don’t know what’s going to happen. I can give you my predictions for five to seven years, but the reality is we’re going to go on that journey together. So learn to be flexible, learn to be in the moment in terms of what might be happening. Don’t be scared by it — this is the way humans advance. But recognize that there’s going to be a lot of change. And generally speaking, humans don’t like change.

Sean Walters: Well, Mark, thank you again for spending the time here today. It’s always great to hear your perspective on things. I really appreciate all you’ve done to advance this profession over the decades, and thanks for all your commitment to the advice profession.

Mark Casady: Thank you — you’re very nice to say so. I feel so blessed to have chosen this profession. I originally thought I wanted to manage money. I thought, I’m going to be a portfolio manager — won’t that be fun? Markets are fascinating to me. Deciding whether it’s Ford or GM that I invest in seemed important to me as a senior in college. I get out, go to Northern Trust — great program there — I start managing money and go: this isn’t fun at all. I can’t change this company. I can only sell its stock or buy its stock. But I actually want to change the company. And so that’s led me to management, and I’ve been very lucky to have some really interesting management assignments, applying technology in the world and getting to know amazing people who do financial advice for a living. So it’s been a very lucky career.

Sean Walters: A great profession. Well, thank you all for listening to The Exceptional Advisor today. Mark’s article, and the rest of the AI issue, is available at the Investments & Wealth Institute website — I encourage you to download that along with any of our other resources, and make sure you stay tuned to our podcast. We’ll come out with another episode in another two or three weeks. Thanks for joining us, and I hope you have a good experience with your AI partner in the future.