How artificial intelligence is transforming financial consultants’ work
2–3 minutes
In a statement published by Business Insider on Monday (26), Rick Nott, senior managing director at Angeles Investments in Santa Monica, explained how he uses artificial intelligence to avoid tedious tasks as an investment consultant. He said that tools like Claude from Anthropic have helped connect disparate financial systems and reduce manual spreadsheet work.
This account is useful for anyone who deals with reports, consolidations, and recurring documents in any field. It shows where technology already saves time and where human judgment remains essential.
The workload that consumed the consultant’s time
Nott serves high-net-worth families, and his routine involved gathering data from various platforms, reconciling information, and turning it into reports. According to Business Insider, this manual effort limited detailed balance sheets to clients with more than $100 million in assets.
He estimated that an operation with 30 families and about 10 private investments per family could generate 3,000 documents per year, including quarterly reports, capital calls, distributions, and tax notices. A capital call is a request from a fund for an investor to send money that has already been committed.
What AI has started to do
Nott uses language models—systems trained to understand and generate text—to automate data collection, portfolio analysis, and report production. Colleagues estimate that his output, supported by technology, is equivalent to the work of one more full-time employee.
The consultant describes consulting as a chain that goes from raw data to decisions. In the middle, there is work to gather, format, reconcile, and summarize information, which consumed a disproportionate amount of professionals’ time. According to Nott, AI compresses this layer.
Where human judgment remains essential
Nott says that AI does not replace the human judgment that underpins investment. Speaking to InvestmentNews, he said that decisions about money are, directly or indirectly, emotional, and that better calculations have never been the main bottleneck for results. For him, the benefit of automation is to free up time for client relationships.
He admits that the advantage may be temporary. In Nott’s view, tools like Claude for financial consultants will be disruptive, and other professionals will have access to the same connectivity he has built.
The financial market is already moving
Anthropic launched Claude connectors for consultants in September, which integrate with systems from Charles Schwab, BlackRock, and Vanguard, according to Technology.org. Among the functions is portfolio rebalancing review, with a draft explanation to the client, and human approval remains necessary.
How to apply this example to other areas
Similar tasks exist in finance, operations, HR, and sales: consolidating spreadsheets from different sources, summarizing contracts, creating a first version of a presentation, or comparing scenarios. Checking the numbers and deciding what to do with them remains the professional’s responsibility. Those who want to delve deeper into the topic can find courses such as an online MBA in artificial intelligence focused on business.
What this case shows about working with AI
Nott’s case brings together the key principles guiding technology adoption: automation of repetitive steps, human supervision, and time redirected to decisions and relationships. Anthropic’s connectors follow the same logic by requiring approval in each flow.
