As intelligent assistant solutions mature, we’re seeing an increasing number of assistants geared towards specific verticals or subject matter domains. These smart assistants combine an understanding of natural language inputs with deep, but narrowly-focused, domain expertise. Opus Research has defined these domain-specific assistants in our Intelligent Assistant Landscape as Personal Advisors.

This week there were two announcements that illustrate the maturing scope of personal advisors.

As reported on NewsFactor.com, tax preparer service H&R Block announced the availability of a new proprietary personal tax advisor powered by IBM Watson technology. According to the article, the company is introducing their new AI powered tax advisor in a commercial scheduled to air during this weekend’s Super Bowl.

IBM trained the Watson-based advisor by feeding approximately 600 million real tax returns into the system. The H&R advisor has learned the complex rules of the U.S. tax code and can leverage its knowledge models to make recommendations to individual and professional tax preparers. The personal tax advisor can make suggestions pertaining to possible deductions, how to optimize tax credits, and other adjustments that take advantage of tax rules.

The H&R Block tax advisor can get smarter over time as more people use the service and more tax returns are added to the system’s training database.

In an unrelated announcement, Raymond James revealed plans to roll out a “digital advice platform”” by the end of this year. Some are calling the new Connected Advisor service a “robo-advisor.”

Just a couple of years ago, robo-advisors were still viewed with a large dose of skepticism. At the time, robo-advisors were managing a relatively small amount of assets, compared to the assets under management by human financial managers.

But times have changed, with NerdWallet concluding that “the robo-advisor has officially gone mainstream.” Raymond James’s Connected Advisor seems to be more a tool to assist the firm’s human advisors in automating some of aspects of client account management. It remains to be seen how, or if, the solution will leverage natural language understanding, but the service certainly taps into machine learning algorithms that enable it to detect patterns in trading data.

The age of smart personal advisors is dawning. Given the central role that finances play in all of our lives, it’s no surprise that intelligent advisors are gaining traction in many areas involving money management.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: robo-advisors, Artificial Intelligence, intelligent Assistants, tax returns, H&R Block, Raymond James