Skating to Where the Puck Is Going: Building for the Future of Advice
The industry is obsessed with note-takers. That's where the puck is. Where it's going is somewhere else entirely.
There's a Wayne Gretzky quote that gets used a lot in technology: "I skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck has been." It's a cliche, but it captures something important about the choice every advice firm faces right now. Where is the puck today? Note-takers. The industry is going through a gold rush of AI meeting transcription tools. Over 51 at last count. They all do roughly the same thing: record your meeting, generate a transcript, produce a summary. It's useful. It's where the puck is right now. But is that where it's going? No. Note-taking is a point solution for a point problem. It doesn't change the advice model. It doesn't create new revenue streams. It doesn't let you serve clients you couldn't serve before. It saves you 20 minutes per meeting, which is genuinely helpful, but it's not transformative. Where the puck is going looks very different. It looks like AI that's embedded in every step of the advice process — not just meetings, but fact-finding, compliance, document generation, client communications, and portfolio analysis. It looks like digital ecosystems where clients interact with educational content, calculators, and self-service tools that feed data back into the adviser's workflow. It looks like hybrid advice models where full-fat financial planning and digital guidance coexist on the same platform, with the same data layer, managed by the same team. It looks like configurable compliance agents that check every interaction against your firm's specific rules in real-time. It looks like firms with 100 clients today serving 1,000 tomorrow — not by hiring 10x the staff, but by fundamentally changing how advice is delivered. When you buy a note-taker, you're buying where the puck is. When you invest in a platform that's building all of this as a unified system, you're skating to where it's going. The firms that made the note-taker decision in 2024 are already wondering what's next. The firms that chose to invest in the future are already living it.