Every Booth on the Floor Was Selling the Same Thing

Walking an exhibit hall full of AI vendors is a little like speed dating where everyone has the same personality and a different haircut.

I spent last week doing exactly that at Schwab IMPACT, the big annual conference for financial advisors. I came home more excited about where wealth management is headed than I expected, and more convinced than ever that most firms are about to overpay for software they could create themselves.

Before we get there, two announcements I've been sitting on.

We're hiring. Two roles. An AI Consultant, who works directly with clients to figure out where AI fits in their business and then builds it. And a Junior AI Consultant, who learns the craft alongside our team while building real Claude workflows for real clients from week one. If that's you, or someone you know, apply here.

Our exec training curriculum is officially out. We've had a lot of interest and ran it with a few executives first to make sure it actually works. It does. Again :), if you or someone you know could use some exec training, learn more and reach out here.

This week:

What I saw on the Schwab IMPACT exhibit floor

The AI accessibility story nobody is talking about

OpenAI's four deals in Abu Dhabi, Google's Gemini 4 Carbon, and Anthropic's 40% government discount

The Deep Dive

Every Booth on the Floor Was Selling the Same Thing

Small note in case you missed it: AI has made some big waves in the stock market lately :).

So it made sense that a room full of financial advisors was buzzing about it. We've recently started working closely with RIAs and wealth management firms, and getting to be at Schwab IMPACT was a great experience. The energy around AI in this space is real.

I think we're going to see a huge shift in how these firms operate over the next 2-4 years. The operational work, the manual work, a lot of the investing grunt work, all of it moves off people's plates. What's left is the relationship. Advisors get to spend their time helping clients and being there for them, which is the reason most of them got into this business in the first place.

And you don't have to wait that long. Just by using Claude well, you can get 85% of the way there today. Your people still review everything. They're still the humans in the loop. But the majority of their time goes to clients instead of paperwork.

Now for the really interesting part.

Walking around the exhibit hall, I saw booth after booth of AI products selling basically the same thing with a different name and a different color scheme. Meeting notes that write themselves. CRM updates. Client prep briefs. Compliance-friendly email drafts.

To be fair, every single one is a solid product. If you measure it against the old way of doing things, they all save real hours.

But I didn't see a single one that does enough beyond what you can already do in Claude to be worth the price tag. Some of them mirror what Claude can do and make it easier out of the box. That's worth something. It just isn't worth as much as they're charging, because it really isn't that hard to create the same capabilities directly in your own Claude setup.

Here's where I landed. Strip away the branding and most of these products turn into glorified databases. They hold your client data, your notes, your history. The thinking happens in the model. So when a firm asks me which one to buy, my answer is simple: pick the one that connects to Claude best, and build the rest yourself.

If you run an RIA or a wealth management firm and you're staring at three vendor demos right now wondering which one to sign, talk to us first. We'll show you what you can build in your own Claude before you commit to another annual contract.

From the Field

The AI Accessibility Story Nobody Is Talking About

Here's one thing people don't realize about AI tools: what they do for accessibility.

Let me paint you a picture. Someone gets chronic headaches from looking at a computer screen. They're an amazing employee. They think creatively and get work done at an insane pace. But they frequently can't be in front of their computer, because the screen is the thing that hurts.

Put that same person in a meeting, though, and they're great. They can talk through a problem, go back and forth with someone, and land on an answer with no trouble at all.

Enter Claude or ChatGPT. With the voice agent, that person can suddenly interact with their computer and all the products they need to do their job just by having a conversation. Draft the email. Pull up the client file. Update the tracker. Read me back what you changed. The screen stops being a requirement for doing great work.

(In our house, the voice agent has a name. My wife named it Mara.)

The reason this travels: every company has someone whose best work is being capped by the format of the job rather than by their ability. Voice AI quietly removes a lot of those caps. If you've got someone like that on your team, it's worth an afternoon to set them up.

AI News Worth Your Time

Three Stories From This Week

OpenAI signs four deals with Abu Dhabi to build the first AI-native government

OpenAI signed four agreements with Abu Dhabi on Monday after Sam Altman met with Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled. ADNOC will use AI for oilfield development planning, the sovereign fund Mubadala will use it for investment analysis, and a five-year deal with G42's Inception42 will push AI adoption across UAE government, businesses and schools. The headline piece is a "Machine-Readable Government" initiative that converts policies and regulations into a format AI can read, so officials can run routine checks on permits and certificates faster. The first pilot is already live, handling food imports.

My take: The ADNOC and Mubadala deals will get the attention, but the machine-readable rules piece is the one to watch. A government rewriting its own rulebook so AI can read it is the same thing every business needs to do with its SOPs and policies. If your processes only live in someone's head, AI can't help with them. READ THE ANADOLU REPORT →

Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon

Just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which it calls its strongest model yet. Google says it tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and is built for long-running coding and cybersecurity work, with the ability to chase down and fix bugs across large codebases for days at a time. The catch is that you can't use it yet. Google is giving it to a small group of cyber defenders first through its Fairwind Program, and there's no date for a wider release.

My take: Two frontier models in two weeks from one company. The release pace is now faster than most businesses can evaluate, which is exactly why chasing the newest model is the wrong game. Pick a platform, get good at it, and let the upgrades come to you. READ THE IT BRIEF REPORT →

Anthropic gives US governments 40% off Claude

Anthropic expanded its deal with the General Services Administration, giving government buyers 40% off Claude Enterprise, Claude for Government and the Claude API, with no minimum spend. For the first time it also covers state, local, tribal and territorial governments, not just federal agencies. Anthropic says about 500 US government organizations already use Claude and estimates the deal will save taxpayers $1 billion. OpenAI has a similar GSA deal at 50% off.

My take: The bigger news here is the state and local piece. Your town, your county, your school district can now buy Claude at a real discount. If you sell to local government, expect the people across the table to start showing up a lot more AI-literate than they were a year ago. READ THE NEXT WEB REPORT →

That's it for this week.

If this was useful, forward it to the advisor or ops lead at a wealth management firm who's sitting through vendor demos right now. That's who this is for.

And if you want to talk about what AI could do for your business, not in theory, but in your workflows, with your team, on your timeline, reach out at [email protected]. That's what we're here for.