Advice efficiency gains through AI tools

Jackie Clark (Colonial First State) and Sean Lee (Colonial First State) discuss how advisers can use readily available AI tools — with no programming and just simple language instructions — to complete basic tasks in the office, and help drive business efficiency

Eighteen months ago, Colonial First State (CFS) began its own journey with artificial intelligence (AI) by adopting Microsoft 365 Copilot across the business. Microsoft Copilot is an AI tool designed to enhance productivity by helping users with tasks like drafting content, summarising information, and automating workflows by providing intelligent suggestions and responses. 

Copilot integrates with everyday applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, by leveraging large language models and a user’s own data to personalise its assistance. Since implementing Copilot, 95 per cent of the CFS business has transitioned to Copilot and uses this tool every day.

Sean Lee — Executive Director of Enterprise Systems and Business Applications at Colonial First State — is at the coalface when it comes to identifying technology that can be implemented across businesses to improve efficiency

By Jayson Forrest

Speaking on the topic of ‘AI — Trends, opportunities and how advice practices can unlock enhanced efficiency and uplift their client experience’ at the IMAP Advice in Action 2025 conference, Sean identifies three emerging themes occurring in AI that’s helping to improve business efficiency.

1. Hyper-personalisation: The use of AI to create very personalised content and experiences for individual users. It has the potential to completely transform how businesses engage with their employees and clients.

2. Supercharged automation: The ability to use AI to automate simple and repetitive tasks — by using simple language and ‘no-code’ tools — is enabling users to develop applications and automate business processes without writing code and with little to no programming knowledge.

3. Agentic AI with a multi-agent model: A system where multiple AI agents (software programs), each with their own specialised capabilities, collaborate to achieve a common goal. These agents operate autonomously, meaning they can make decisions and take actions independently, but they also communicate and co-ordinate with each other to solve complex problems more effectively than a single agent could. This approach is similar to how teams of experts work collaboratively in organisations, like an advice practice, with each agent focusing on a specific part of a larger task.

“AI is becoming increasingly embedded in our lives,” says Sean. “We are seeing more people use AI on a daily basis, both for personal use and for work. These three trends will significantly transform how we work and consume information.”

Jackie Clark — Director of Education, Engagement and Events at Colonial First State — agrees that AI will be transformational for businesses. She is already seeing advice practices leveraging  AI to become more efficient.

“The practical application of AI in advice businesses is still in its infancy,” says Jackie. “To date, the two main areas where most advice businesses have been using AI tools are with correcting grammar in documents, and file noting.”

Popular file note platforms include: Microsoft Teams, Filenote.ai, Otter.ai, and Claras.ai. However, Jackie adds that when using AI tools, like file noting, advisers need to ensure their data is safely secured. 

“You need to understand who your provider is and where your data is stored. These are fundamental questions advice businesses need to be able to answer,” she says. “ASIC is very clear about needing to know who your third-party providers are. You need to think carefully about companies that store your data offshore.”

Jackie points to the efficiency gains of using AI tools for file noting. As an example, she cites an advice practice that has reduced the time spent on file noting per client from around three hours to 15 minutes. This means that for each adviser seeing 10 clients per week, they are each saving about 25 hours per week. Add that to the efficiency gains of using a managed account, and that considerably frees up an adviser’s time to be used elsewhere within the business on higher value tasks.

However, Jackie acknowledges that within advice businesses, there has currently only been limited success using AI for ‘prompting’ — the process of crafting effective instructions for AI models to generate specific outputs. “Google may look like AI, but it’s not. So, the more detailed your prompt can be, the more targeted the results that are generated.”

A trend Jackie is seeing in the market is employing staff who have skills and capabilities around prompting. She adds that many larger universities are already including a unit around prompting in their business courses.

Importantly, Jackie adds that when it comes to adopting technology and building an advice business around that tech, you need to be confident that the tech company will still be there over the long-term. That factor was an important consideration for CFS when it moved to Microsoft, confident in the longevity of its AI tools.

From Jackie’s perspective, one of the most exciting practical applications of AI for advisers is using this technology to improve an SOA (Statement of Advice), by moving a static document into a more engaging PowerPoint format. By doing so, it can transform an SOA into a very client-friendly layout.

“AI can’t replace the critical thinking required in the SOA, but it can be used in terms of the overall presentation of the document. In terms of presenting the key themes and recommendations of an SOA, PowerPoint and Copilot have definitely come a long way,” she says.

“Advisers can upload their SOA document into PowerPoint — and this is safe to do because Microsoft uses enterprise-grade security — and specify what they want this software to do, like provide a client overview, key recommendations, next steps, provide disclaimers, and use their corporate branding in, say, 15 slides.”

Jackie acknowledges that PowerPoint is still not perfect in how it uses an adviser’s information, and is still unable to import tables and charts as much as an adviser would like. However, what it does provide is a great foundation for an easy-to-use and client-friendly document as a starting point for advisers, who are then able to customise the presentation by adding in tables and charts separately. Jackie believes that by using software, like PowerPoint, can significantly reduce an adviser’s time within a practice, while improving client engagement.  

Sean is excited about the range of AI tools coming to market, which are hyper-personalising the experience for the users and beneficiaries of this technology. He is particularly enthusiastic about ‘AI reasoning agents’, which he believes will provide greater business efficiencies.

AI reasoning agents are sophisticated AI systems designed to perform complex tasks autonomously by leveraging reasoning capabilities to analyse information, make decisions, and take actions. These agents go beyond simple rule-based systems or pre-programmed instructions, exhibiting the ability to learn from data, adapt to new situations, and even collaborate with other agents. 

According to Sean, Microsoft Copilot has recently introduced some new AI reasoning agents, which are interesting developments for advice practices. These agents are: Analyst and Researcher.

The Copilot Analyst agent is an AI-powered assistant for data analysis. Sean says the Analyst agent is like having a skilled data analyst on hand to help advisers make sense of data quickly, without requiring advanced expertise.

As an example, Sean says the Analyst agent can be used to provide analysis of the average taxable income changes by postcode over time, and then show their correlation with the number of active financial advisers within that postcode.

The Copilot Researcher agent is designed to assist with research tasks. It helps users gather, analyse, and summarise information from various sources, including web documents and internal files. Advisers can think of the agent as a powerful research partner that efficiently streamlines the research process and provides insights. 

A practical application of Researcher for advisers could be to provide research and reports in relation to specific managed accounts available in the market for comparison purposes.

Whilst not an AI reasoning agent, Sean also believes Copilot Notebooks — which integrates Copilot chat, files, pages, and other resources to create a focused environment for project-based work — is a useful AI-powered tool for advisers. Notebooks allows users to gather information, ask Copilot focused questions based on the content of the notebook, and generate new content based on that context. 

“With the help of AI, we now have the ability to create and deliver content in very different formats,” says Sean. “For those clients who like to read, you can generate documents to share with them, or for those who like to listen, you can generate, say, a two-minute podcast, as well. AI allows advisers to create a very hyper-personalised experience for clients.”

Ask Jackie for her key takeout when using AI in an advice business and she says it’s not to be overwhelmed by this rapidly evolving technology.

“Don’t be overwhelmed by AI. Look for some quick wins by using AI and get them embedded into your business. AI will help you automate repetitive tasks,” says Jackie. “And importantly, get your team onboard with AI.

“At CFS, we didn’t lack the opportunity to use AI; what we lacked was the change management piece that we had to implement to get everybody onboard with it. We knew there were huge efficiencies to be gained by using AI.”

For Jackie her current favourite use of Microsoft Copilot is converting scanned copy, such as from a photo taken on a mobile phone, into editable text. Jackie says this application enables users to then drop this text into a document format, like Word, PowerPoint, Notes or email.

“From a financial planning perspective, this is a great time-savings feature and application. You can take written notes in a client meeting, scan or take an image of these notes, and then quickly convert that into an editable format that can be used as a file note,” says Jackie.

Sean agrees it’s important that advisers don’t feel overwhelmed by AI. One of his favourite tools is Copilot Prompt Coach, which assists users to craft well-structured, effective prompts  (instructions or questions that users provide to guide Copilot in performing tasks like summarising documents, generating content, or answering questions). He believes this is a good example of an AI tool that can assist advisers drive greater efficiencies within their business.

“Embrace what’s available,” says Sean. “Experiment with the tools you already have access to and see what they can do to help you become more efficient from a business perspective. This will also help you enhance your client engagement experience.” 

Jackie Clark is Director of Education, Engagement and Events at Colonial First State; and

Sean Lee is Executive Director of Enterprise Systems and Business Applications at Colonial First State.

They spoke on the topic of ‘AI — Trends, opportunities and how advice practices can unlock enhanced efficiency and uplift their client experience’ at the IMAP Advice in Action 2025 conference.

The session was moderated by Michelle Krig — Director and State Manager NSW at Colonial First State.