Study aid for earning designations
Using AI helped me study smarter and work faster.
AI has been a tremendous time-saver for me in several ways, including helping me study for my Chartered Life Underwriting (CLU) designation and drafting client letters.
Efficient studying
I’m pursuing my CLU designation now, and that means remembering a lot of different formulas and definitions. So, as I’m training and going through the program, I’m entering my notes into ChatGPT, a generative AI tool. This platform allows me to enter in all of that information I read, of which I’ll probably retain maybe half of it. However, AI remembers 100% of everything you tell it. So, when I’m done, I ask AI to quiz me on the material. I can prompt it to give me a test with multiple-choice questions, true and false, and even case studies.
I ask it to give me 50 or 100 questions, and ChatGPT can give me an exam almost instantly. This allows me to make sure I understand the information before I take the exam. That’s where I have found AI to be the most powerful in helping me study.
Client letters
Some tasks for financial advisors can take hours. For example, in Canada, we have something called the reason why letter for clients, which explains why we implemented the solutions for them. This can be a very complex letter, and I felt like it was going to overwhelm the client. We want to create letters that simply convey the reasons for our recommendation. But then I had a high-net-worth client who wanted all the facts, science and math behind everything we did. It would have taken me hours to pull those explanations, word everything properly, use the right calculations and so forth.
I put an initial draft letter into ChatGPT and told it to simplify it for me. Within 15 minutes, not only did I have both letters, but I was also able to edit them. AI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t have that personal touch, but that’s what we’re there for — to add our unique service. It saved me hours of time.
Getting started
When I started using AI, my first step was downloading ChatGPT. I then started asking it questions just like I would in Google’s search engine. After telling ChatGPT that I was a financial advisor, my first questions were
- Where do I start?
- How do I use you?
- What can you do for me?
- What are things that are going to save me time?
- What are some good emails I can use to reach out to my clients without sounding like a salesperson?
I’m cautious with using AI because it’s powerful and there’s so much we don’t know. We also have a lot of very strict compliance rules in Canada that we need to abide by, and privacy is important to us. But even with my limited use, AI has been a huge time-saver for me.