A top Silicon Valley wealth tech investor has warned on the dangers of incorrect application of AI noting the right skill and expertise is needed to make use of the emerging technology.
Communify chair and CEO John Wise has been one of the most prolific wealth tech leaders, having founded TCA Syntec in the UK, and Netik and InvestCloud in the US.
He left InvestCloud in early 2024 before founding Communify, which uses AI to integrate market and client data to generate personalised content.
“For certain things, using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, great – we all use them,” Wise told the Conversations with Conexus podcast.
But Wise said outage incidents such as the one that hit AWS last month demonstrated that “AI is a very dangerous thing”. The breakdown was reportedly caused by the AI agent Kiro making the autonomous decision to “delete and recreate the environment” it was working in, according to a report from the Financial Times, and resulted in a 13-hour interruption of one of AWS’ systems.
“There’s even new language – blast radius – how many things did we impact with this AI release that went rogue?”
However, a publicly posted correction from Amazon stated that the service interruption was the result of user error due to specifically misconfigured access controls and not AI.
As AI becomes more prevalent, Wise said the right AI tools need to be used for the right applications.
“There are gaps in the market and people have to be careful about how they use it,” Wise said.
“If you want precision and you need it to be accurate – which you do in our industry… because it’s an industry of trust – you need deterministic AI. If you’re summarising some language and then you limit the data source AI has access to, you can use generative [AI] as well so you can convert certain things into a passage and it will work.”
Nickola Cable, vice president for APAC growth at Communify, said there is huge opportunity for Australia to leverage technology and addresses challenges like advice being available only for high-net-worth investors.
“There is a huge market there, a huge need,” Cable said.
“The thing that excites me is that you can leverage AI to create massive scale right across the wealth continuum from self-directed to our traditional advice [models] and address that missing middle. We’re ready to do that because digitally, if you take away all the confusion.”
The firm has already partnered with Australia’s largest licensee, Entireti, to build a “digital ecosystem platform” for advice businesses and their clients.
Entireti’s ERA platform will use AI and automation to gather, analyse and organise data from a practice’s existing technology.
The tool will analyse sources such as emails, financial planning software and other apps to create a central knowledge base of information and insights, with appropriate security guardrails in place.
The platform will be developed in phases, with the first phase expected to be made available to the Entireti network, which includes Akumin, Fortnum, Personal Financial Services and Entireti Alliances, later in 2026.
Wise said it’s his “personal belief” that most of the tech systems out there aren’t that good.
“Some of the procedures [and] policies by organisations, quite frankly, I don’t think they’re that good either. Even for high-net-worth individuals,” Wise said.
“It’s quite shocking how much money has been spent for them to be that bad on the user experience, the workflow.”
