Fireflies.ai has entered the financial advisor AI notetaking group chat.
Amid a flurry of AI announcements last week, the one that caught my increasingly skeptical eye was that of Fireflies for Finance, a new product from Fireflies.ai that touts finance-specific post-meeting summary templates and integrations with two popular advisor CRM systems, Wealthbox and Redtail.
And with hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of individual users, Fireflies.ai has an established footprint, allowing it to severely undercut the leading specialized providers in price.
Fireflies.ai’s base product, Pro, starts at $10 per seat per month, billed annually ($120 a year minimum for a single user). It provides unlimited meeting transcription and AI summaries with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat.
The company also has a “Business” product that is $19 per seat per month billed annually ($228) for unlimited storage and video recording, team analytics for a firm’s administrator and other features. With its Enterprise product, Fireflie.ai’s top offering, at $39 per seat per month ($468 per seat annually), an advisory firm would get all the other features and services and administrative controls, among other things.
The AI note takers that have been customized for and specifically marketed to financial advisors thus far, including Jump and Zocks (among others), which I have written about several times over the last year, are more expensive.
Jump charges on a per-user basis, too, with most advisors paying between $100 and $120 per advisor per month, or about $1,200 to $1,440 a year per seat.
Zocks prices differently. It charges based on the number of meetings in which its technology is used. It has two products, Starter and Professional, which are $800 and $1,300 annually and support 50 meetings per month and 100 meetings per month, respectively (with $0.99 per meeting beyond 50 or 100).
This is a significant price difference: $120 – $468 per year for Fireflies.ai versus $800 – $1400 per year for Jump or Zocks.
As this plays out, I think it will come down to accuracy, features and integrations (how many and how good they are). As advisors who have used these AI tools from the early days already know, what I will term general AI notetakers are often not trained in the advisor lexicon.
For example, a month ago, when using the popular Otter.ai platform to record and transcribe an interview, the AI interpreted the company Envestnet as “invest net,” “investment” or “familiar firm.” Advyzon became “Advison,” and fellow AI notetaker Zocks became ZOX.
Similarly, as part of its study on six AI notetakers specializing in wealth management, the Oasis Group also fed its testing script to the non-industry-specific AI found in Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The ubiquitous 529 account tripped up both. They missed the wealth management context of what a 529 plan or account was, instead literally transcribing the words “five, two, nine” when the actor spoke it, whereas the wealth-management-focused AIs all got it (as would a human advisor).
For advisors who have yet to dip their toes into the waters of AI notetakers—and even those who have—I heartily recommend checking out the Oasis report (sponsored by tech provider AdvisorEngine, which also just announced its own integrations with three of the providers), which took a rigorous approach to testing and provides a great deal of detail on the six products in the study (FinMate, GReminders, Jump, Mili, Zeplyn and Zocks).
Each product was evaluated based on its ability to capture the full conversation of the test script mentioned above, how well it summarized key insights and identified key financial terminology and how it assessed the tone or temperament of the conversation. The study also looked at each product’s ability to generate actionable next steps.
Beyond conversation accuracy and data extraction, the Oasis team conducted a user interface and user experience evaluation of each application to assess usability and intuitiveness, automation and customization, and integration capabilities and identify their distinguishing features.
“At the end of the day, an advisor is really trying to use these AI tools as a force multiplier, allowing them to focus on the conversation with the client conversation and not the notetaking,” said John O’Connell, founder and CEO of The Oasis Group.
“Most of the AI note takers are great at taking what you are saying literally, but some of the really soft things like … not picking up on and creating an action item for when the family is expecting a child, to send some sort of card or gift to them,” he said, referring to part of the test script that none of the six tested providers caught.
“You should be looking at improving your product to pick up on this stuff because ultimately that’s what’s going to move the industry forward,” O’Connell said.
To be sure, Jump, for example, has already inked deals with many advisors and firms, including most recently Cetera, which is providing all 12,000 of its advisors access to the technology. Other firms have approved its use as well, including Integrated Partners, Mission Wealth and Sanctuary Wealth. It is also part of LPL Financial’s vendor affinity program, meaning it is approved for use by the IBD’s 23,000 affiliated advisors.
For advisors who are most sensitive to cost but want to start taking advantage of automated notetaking, especially those already using Wealthbox or Redtail, Fireflies.ai is pretty compelling. But for firms with a more complex technology ecosystem, evaluate the more advisor-customized products, particularly GReminders, Jump, Zocks and Zeplyn and the features that best mesh or integrate with the tech you already have.
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