Deloitte has just released its Financial services industry predictions | Deloitte Insights. As shown in the diagram below, they predict a growing dependence on AI for investment advice.

But, if that proves to be true, who is that really going to help? Is it likely to meaningfully improve your investment results or your experience? We don’t think it will.

As we earlier wrote in Is there any difference between an “AI” and a Human Investment Advisor? (sayrita.com), we believe that AI, in its predicted role, will likely perpetuate a deeper dependence on “black box” / “behind the curtain” formulated recommendations and “advice,” the soundness and validity of which investors and/or advisors will have no way of verifying.

Will that improve investment results for individual investors? Who knows. But the experience of individual investors (you) – having to trust in investment advice formulated in a way that you cannot observe, directly influence (much less control), or verify for yourself – will likely not meaningfully change. Will “advice” from AI result in a meaningfully different experience for individual investors (you) from the advice you receive from a human advisor? As explained in our earlier post mentioned above, it likely won’t.

Unlike what Deloitte predicts is coming, there is a different way that AI can used other than simply assisting advisors in formulating their recommendations, or AI itself formulating investment recommendations . . . an application that Deloitte appears to have missed.

Our planned AI integrations with the already patented decision-assistance technology powering our Retail Investment Tracking ApplicationSM (“RitaSM”), for individual investors, focuses on enhancing investor empowerment. Those integrations are designed to enhance your power to directly control the comparative evaluation of mutual fund and ETF investment choices and your ability to identify and “vet” those whose composite investment performance (the blends of risk, return and other factors, you select and weight) have proven best over time at producing the investment results you’re seeking. Broad patents applications on these AI-powered enhancements were filed over a year ago.

But you need not wait for all of these enhancements, RitaSM is available for you to use today to optimize your investment selections.

Our goal is to transfer the balance of power away from the big financial service providers in that vendor-dominated marketplace and into the hands of individual investors (your hand) where we believe it as always belonged.

Interestingly, Deloitte also predicts that friends and family will continue to be preferred choices for individual investment advice, significantly beyond investment advisors. This may likely be due to the fact many investors don’t have sufficient investible assets to secure the help of an investment advisor. RitaSM could also play a big part in this, since it uniquely facilitates friends and family discussions and comparisons of the investment performance of mutual funds and ETFs.

Whether or not Deloitte’s predictions prove to be accurate, change is coming, and we are working to be at the leading edge of that change and, most importantly, the leading edge of empowering you and other individual investors.