Cormac Murphy is the CEO of CacheTech Advisor Solutions, a pioneering company providing a single technology solution for RIAs. With a career that began at Charles Schwab in 2008, he earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and managed a $4 billion portfolio. Following his tenure as the Chief Investment Officer at Adams Wealth Advisor, Cormac now guides CacheTech in delivering scalable, quality investment and CRM technology solutions for independent financial advisors. He champions using AI to simplify data access and enhance client relationships for small to midsize RIAs.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:12] Cormac Murphy explains how CacheTech empowers local RIAs
[3:37] The evolution of CacheTech from investments to operations and CRM
[6:17] CacheTech's approach to enhancing customer relationships and communication
[13:40] Cormac talks about CAIT, the AI that simplifies complex financial interactions
[16:24] The potential of AI in content creation for more engaging client experiences
[19:39] The importance of understanding AI and its impact on compliance in regulated industries
[22:57] The challenges and cost-saving benefits of AI in report generation and analysis
[25:25] Cormac discusses how user feedback fuels AI's evolution
[31:45] Cormac's main challenges and goals as CEO, with a focus on sales and marketing without sacrificing innovation
In this episode…
In the ever-competitive business landscape, achieving the perfect harmony between providing sophisticated services and maintaining a personalized touch is crucial, but is it attainable? What if artificial intelligence could be the linchpin in combining high-tech capabilities with that personal flair?
FinTech expert Cormac Murphy delves into the transformative power of AI in enabling independent financial advisors to thrive. He reveals how his company is making this possible, from the firm’s inception story to its revolutionary approach in delivering scalable, institutional-quality tools to independent RIAs — without losing the personal, local feel that's essential in the financial advisory landscape. Cormac emphasizes the importance of a fully integrated ecosystem, including CRM and operations, to prevent costly miscommunications.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Cormac Murphy, CEO of CacheTech Advisor Solutions, about leveraging AI for financial advisory solutions. Cormac talks about CacheTech, the vision behind CAIT, the importance of understanding AI’s impact on compliance in regulated industries, and the challenges and cost-saving benefits of AI in report generation and analysis.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"Revolutionizing Advisor-Client Interactions Through AI With Tom Rieman" on The Customer Wins
"Building Fintech Businesses in Data Privacy With Sid Yenamandra" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] AI Note-Taking for Financial Advisors With Daniel Yoo" on The Customer Wins
"Scaling Business Through Community as an RIA With Joe Moss" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"We believe in true independent financial advice."
"We are a partner in execution, not just a technology provider."
"Our AI is designed to allow humanity to get back in the way."
"Our onboarding is quite in-depth... We want everyone living in the same ecosystem."
"Technology people can catch up... but relationships, you're going to live and die on them."
Action Steps:
Embrace technology that scales your business: Adapt scalable tech solutions like CRM systems to maintain personalized customer relationships while handling more extensive client portfolios. Effective because it merges the need for human touch with tech efficiency, addressing the gap in personalized advisory services for small RIAs.
Integrate AI into your data processes: Utilize AI tools to quickly access complex data, optimize reporting, and reduce manual intervention. This step capitalizes on AI capabilities to streamline workflows, allowing financial advisors to focus on client engagement and strategic decisions.
Engage in-depth with each client during onboarding: Commit to personalized onboarding to understand the individual needs and peculiarities of each client, ensuring tailored solutions. Effective as it ensures custom service delivery, enhancing client satisfaction and loyalty.
Maintain continual learning and development: As AI and technology rapidly evolve, commit to staying informed and continually educating your team to leverage new tools effectively. Negates the risk of falling behind in tech advancements and ensures that you're always offering the best solutions to your clients.
Focus on genuine customer relationships: Invest time in building strong relationships with each customer, which will lead to lasting loyalty and business success. Addresses the challenge of commoditization in financial services, ensuring customer-centric approaches lead to sustainable growth.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:12
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Tom Rieman of Practice Intel, Sid Yenamandra of Surge Ventures and Daniel Yoo of FinMate AI. Today is a special episode of my series on artificial intelligence. And today's guest is Cormac Murphy, CEO of CacheTech advisor solutions.
And today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms instead, get Quik!, using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that is 99.9% accurate. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Joe Moss, founder of Pro Advisor Suite and a prior guest on this show. Go check out Joe's website at proadvisorsuite.com and learn how you can become a part of an excellent RIA community with a ton of benefits.
All right, I'm excited to talk to Cormac Murphy, who began his career at Charles Schwab in 2008 while earning the Chartered Financial Analyst designation and managing a $4 billion portfolio. In 2020, he joined Adams Wealth Advisor as the chief investment officer and led their technology efforts. In 2023, the investment management and technology divisions of Adams were spun off into CacheTech advisor solutions, where he currently serves as CEO, Cormac Welcome to The Customer Wins.
Cormac Murphy 1:53
Hi, Rich. Thanks for having me.
Richard Walker 1:54
I'm excited to have you today, doing some interesting things over there. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and delivered great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Cormac, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Cormac Murphy 2:12
Yes, so CacheTech Advisor Solutions is a company that focuses on independent Ra. So these are financial advisors, not typically at the large institutions. But kind of smaller town, handful of employee shops that are directly engaged with providing their clients investment advice. And so what we strive to do, we really liked the independent model, the hands on approach that really can only be delivered through these smaller local RIA services. But what comes with that is you do miss out on the scale that the larger firms provide, and it can make it difficult in a very competitive landscape.
So from our time at Adams, where we really invested a lot into scalable technology and investment management, we started CacheTech Advisor Solutions to really bring that scalability, that institutional quality to RIAs, similar to Adams, to allow them to benefit from the scale of a larger organization, while maintaining that independence and kind of local feel that we think is so important in the marketplace.
Richard Walker 3:18
So I think that's a great story. A lot of the best firms have been started inside financial firms. The idea came from that the people came from that you guys have actually tested it out, and you made it work at Adams and chose to spin it out. So what are all the breadth of services is purely like investment? Or is it operations? What is it?
Cormac Murphy 3:37
Yeah, so it started primarily focusing on investing and trading. But what we found is the biggest mistakes tended to do occur from miscommunication between various departments. So we quickly evolved to a CRM platform operations, tasks, all of that, that you would typically see the idea being, we don't want just investors and traders, portfolio managers in one set of software operations. And another, we want everyone living in the same ecosystem, very easy to communicate back and forth, and have that client data, client notes, all of that stuff very front and center for everyone involved and keep people out of their silos.
So the breadth is quite large. But we engaged with different clients and different aspects. The idea though, we think the greatest value is unlocked. When you bring that full, integrated ecosystem together.
Richard Walker 4:31
Are you replacing a CRM? Are you complementing a CRM because that tends to be a cornerstone or even the hub for a lot of people?
Cormac Murphy 4:38
Yeah, so I think the answer is, depending on the client, it can be both. I think that especially in the space we're in right now, in the smaller ad space, these are not tech people. There's not a marketing department, a lot of that, so they may end up with a very robust CRM tool, but Salesforce HubSpot, things like that, that they aren't fully utilized and that the software is just too complicated, they don't have the time to invest. So what we have is a very lightweight CRM, that if you're more or less using it to keep some notes, set tasks, reminders for yourself, things like that very basic functionality.
We'd like that to live there. Very easy, very accessible. Now, we do integrate, though, with more high powered CRM systems. Because if you're in digital marketing, running campaigns, things like that, that's beyond the scope of what we are doing. So we want to make sure there's that seamless interaction, though, between them syncing the systems up and allowing your everyday users to not have to be a power user of some of the more robust CRM system.
Richard Walker 5:44
At Quik!, we used Salesforce a long time ago, we were just too small, the team. And it was way too cumbersome for us for what our needs were at the time. And then we eventually switched over to HubSpot. And I can just imagine as an advisor, because I was an advisor, the complexity of trying to do that we talked a lot of customers that have that kind of complexity, and they don't have the need for so that's pretty cool. I'm curious about something else. This started Adams, why spin it out? Whose idea was it? And who championed it saying, I want to take this to the world? You guys had something good for yourselves?
Cormac Murphy 6:17
Well, yeah, we did. And we still do, right? We're still tightly connected, similar ownership groups, all of that. So, this is wasn't a departure from the strategy at Adams. But Adams is a local firm, we serve as people in Logan, Utah and St. George, Utah, not big cities, not huge markets, we believe in that small town independent advisory space, where we can really have a footprint in the community. So when you go the technology and investment management, we built out those scales very, very well, so in some regards, it was almost not I wouldn't go sorry to say overkill, because it delivered a Best In Breed solution.
But we thought, hey, there are plenty of markets out there that we're never going into where if you spread yourself too wide as an RIA, you lose that independence and that kind of local feel that we think is so important. So we said, hey, we can help people in similar situations like us. And we believe in the broader space, not just the way Adams does it, we believe in true independent financial advice.
Richard Walker 7:25
Are you guys finding it different, easier, better, worse, etc, to serve people outside of atoms? Because you used to serve an internal customer to keep the tech running or what have you. Now you have customers using it? Does it feel different, or you had to change your methodologies for customer success and service?
Cormac Murphy 7:45
You have to be more flexible in that year, as we keep saying the, the thing we like is that independence. So what we really wanted to focus on was not saying, okay, this that we did at Adams, now we're going to jam it on to our other clients, we want to work with those clients to use that platform to greater enable their ability to deliver what makes them unique. So unlike other firms out there, our onboarding is quite in depth, we want to come in person we want to meet you, we want to learn about the firm, because we think that ultimately, we're gonna tailor the solution to best have you deliver on that promise to your clients, not say, hey, this is how it's done. Take it or leave it to standardized that.
Richard Walker 8:29
So does that mean that you're making it feel like an internal organization to this external customer like you are their team?
Cormac Murphy 8:35
Exactly. No, we say, one of our sort of catchphrases is we are a partner in execution. So and we really believe that if this was just an app, and you sign up and your nameless client, what we don't want that that's not what we're out for. We're striving for quality in depth client relationships, because we want to be able to help them and compliment them and even help out if things go wrong. We actually are registered as a investment advisor, we only serve other advisors.
But the reason that we went through that additional regulatory burden, and all of that is because if things start going really wrong, we have a greater ability to step in and help you out and solve some problems. Because we know, if you're a three, four person shop, things are really blowing up, it can be really, really stressful. And we want to be there, not just from a technology side, but from a people side and how we serve our clients.
Richard Walker 9:27
And I like this. I don't know that I've heard this approach. And I've heard of others spinning out. One of our partners is Advisor360. Jeff Schwantz was on our show, and they came out of Commonwealth. And it was amazing. I mean Commonwealth built as a broker dealers amazing technology platform, and they realized others could benefit so they spun it out. And of course they had to go through the retooling and such. But you don't hear a lot of this. I don't hear a lot of this in the RIA space. And I don't mean to ask about your competitors. But is this a crowded market? Are you guys really unique in what you're doing?
Cormac Murphy 9:57
I would say, it can appear to be a crowded market. There are people that are doing similar things, and they're doing it well. So I would say that there are good solutions out there. I do think though the people aspect is what differentiates us, we had a text service provider, and I'm sure we weren't their largest client, but we were paying well over $100,000 a year. Now, as we were developing CacheTech, we ultimately cancelled the contract, and didn't get so much as a phone call.
We didn't know anybody at the firm. I guess they make plenty of money. So maybe 100,000 isn't much but in my world that at least gets you a phone call. And so with that, we really do strive on differentiating ourselves there. Now, from a technology standpoint, we do have a bit of the last mover advantage. So I would say, I would put our tech and everything against any of our competitors. And do you actually think it's superior with that last mover advantage, and the fact that it was not developed by private equity venture capital backed tech FinTech project, we built this to serve RIAs, quite frankly, one of the best things about it is that we didn't have that startup pressure to monetize quickly get to market get 80% of needs covered, and advertise, advertise, advertise, it's like, hey, there's a successful business that's using this, if it never amounted to anything, we were fine.
Most important was, make sure it is doing the absolute best job at what it's meant to do. And then we get to bring it to a market. And I think really having not focused on what advertising is going to work best, or what features are going to do best in a video or commercial segment or something like that, we're just saying, like, hey, this is how we found the best way to run an RIA is, and we built this tool with that sole purpose in mind.
Richard Walker 11:51
I love that. So I'm going to go back to something else you started with, though, because I made this point in the presentation today, which is if you want to deliver the best customer experience, one of the things you have to think about is the service must outperform the product or features. So you're providing all these different capabilities, but your ability to have people relate to the customer work with them one on one, that's how you outperform it. That's how you create the best service model and therefore get the best customer success in my view. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing like loyalty and higher adoption and faster conversions?
Cormac Murphy 12:26
Yeah, I think that that's definitely something we've seen with our users is that they do really like when they have an issue that somebody's stepping in and addressing it immediately. It's a person, it's not, hey, look at this, how to video to the point where, hey, we're gonna do this for you right now, if you want to be more self-sufficient in the future, we're happy to train you up and help you through this. But there are certain clients that engage with us as, hey, I don't want to touch trading, I don't even really need to know about it. We trust your systems, and all of that keep us in the loop. But we will put it all in your hands. And then there are the more in the weeds advisors.
But we still want to be there as a resource to bounce ideas off. And really, it's a two way street. We love the conversations because we can learn more too, nobody's perfect, right? And the more we learn from creative people out in the space, the better we can make the product and the better we can serve their needs. And hopefully other people's needs that kind of see a new interesting way of doing things.
Richard Walker 13:25
Yeah, love it. All right, let's talk AI. I saw on your website, you have an AI called CAIT. So the AI within CacheTech. That's very clever. But awesome. So what is CAIT, what are your AI capabilities?
Cormac Murphy 13:40
But yeah, you picked up on the CacheTech AI, that's nice. Also haven't seen my daughter's middle name. too good of an overlap to pass up. So yeah, so CAIT is meant to be, it's an AI under overlay. A lot of the large language model, generative AI overlay to some of the things in cash tech, the idea being just as we were talking about those complicated CRMs is that data, it can be hard to access, you can have all the best reporting tools in the world. But like, quite frankly, it's challenging to make a good, you know, business intelligence report or something like that.
And if you don't know what you're doing and know how to access that data, you'll miss out on the insights from it. So what we want to use AI for is to really simplify the access to your data. So you may have something clients have a lot of trust documents and that you're dealing with or LLCs, things like that. They're very, very boring to read and they are time intensive. We're taking that storing that in vectorizing and keeping it in a place to where you can interact with that in a very natural language format. Okay, what is John, who are the trustees on this trust again, I'm opening another account for this LLC. I just want to make sure I have all the partner names correct.
And then CAIT has the document read and spit It's out that information, everything from I'm heading into a client meeting, how is John Doe done year to date performance wise, rather than click on this report, do this download that validate the data, because things can get messy when you're doing these ad hoc reports, we want it right at your fingertips. Additionally, in the AI space, where we use the generative aspects of it, is there are certain check the box routines that you have to do, and one of those that we really jumped into words was an investment policy statement. This is a really important document and a client advisor relationship. But they're time consuming.
And so what ends up happening is that you create these generic things, so and so's this old, they are going to invest aggressively, blah, blah, blah, and every single one looks exactly the same. And then the client, they're supposed to, it's kind of the agreement between you of how things are going to work within the Investment Strategy and broader advice relationship. But it's so boring, the clients never gonna read it, we want to use generative AI to scalably, add personalization there, make it something the client actually can read and understand and allow you to customize documents, make it have a better personal feel almost the opposite of moving towards the robots, like we're actually using the robot to allow humanity or your human element to get back in that way. We're really giving personalized, tailored solutions to the clients.
Richard Walker 16:24
No, I love this. So one of the things I think about is, I like how AI is being applied to documents. So you can query documents, ask questions of documents, because, like, the common thing is contracts. And if you've been in business, long time, you have hundreds of contracts, they have terms, they have dates, they have renewals, they have all these different facets. And if you didn't take great care to hand enter those data points into some system, how do you know it? And so it's really cumbersome. And you're kind of you're talking about that with trust statements and estate plans, et cetera, being able to serve like serve through that data and find the relevant points. That's a great application.
Cormac Murphy 17:01
Exactly. We're having the AI be the expert there that you can then ask a question, very targeted for what you're looking for, because sifting through those even, pages and pages that just tell you, you have to pay your bill every month on the 15th. Like, that's what I cared about, I didn't care about all the legalese around it like, when is this deal? Right? Who are the people on this trust? How do we handle distributions? Like, typically, when you're referring to these documents, it's a very quick question that you just need someone to answer for you. But if you're looking through it yourself, it's very time consuming. And just can lead to kind of simple mistakes, though, to write because you're just bore yourself to death and then overlook something.
Richard Walker 17:44
Yeah. So can I ask how you guys did it? I do have? Did you hire an AI expert into your team? Did you bring on another company to help you build it? Because, I mean, this is also new, a lot of companies are trying to figure out how should they add these capabilities into their toolset?
Cormac Murphy 17:59
Yeah, so we did not hire anyone externally, we have a very strong team here, developer team, and we built it ground up now, it is backbone on opening eyes platform, and that they provide very, very awesome developer friendly tools. So really impressive what they've done. So we do utilize that and kind of stand on the shoulders of giants there. But we didn't want to outsource it. Because we needed it to solve the problems we were looking for, we were not looking for another email generation tool, we were looking for things that were very specific to our business and our business needs. So we wanted to be in the weeds building it out ourselves, and obviously, we have the people that are capable of doing that. So we were more than happy to own that process.
Because it is new, and you're gonna have to iterate on it. And I think, too many companies that maybe outsource these integrations, the technology is moving so fast that if you don't understand how its implemented within your own system, you're going to be on that hamster wheel of like, you're either going to pay for more and more outsourcing. And you're gonna have a hard time connecting the wires and really thinking, oh, wow, that's a cool new advancement in the space. How does that fit to what we're already doing? Because we know the pipes underneath at all?
Richard Walker 19:19
Yeah. Are you concerned about the change in models? The chat GPT model going from four is now 4.0 or four five? I can't remember. But do you have any concern about that the model changing, causing the wrong answers or the wrong type of outcomes in your system?
Cormac Murphy 19:39
I think that it's certainly a concern and especially, in a highly regulated industry, you have to be very smart at your prompting and things like that to make sure that you keep it in its range, right? Yes, it's not something for it to be useful to us. We are really focusing on that advisor client, not their end client, there's a lot of risks when you open it up there, and a very uncertain compliance environment as well. So the model is changing. In general, we've got better and better, fewer errors that come from each iteration.
But we definitely do test the new models before we move on. And there are certain times where there's your models that are a bit faster, because they're not as complex. And so we will make sure that we're using the proper model for the use case. Overall, I think you do have to be aware of this. And it's going to be changing very, very fast. So you can't it's not just a blindly upgrade the model. But it compliments to the people working on it. Now, every step forward has been nothing but positive for us.
Richard Walker 20:50
Yeah. So, Cormac, I'm kind of curious how you guys decided to use AI. And I'm going to tell my own story real briefly here. Because we launched a product earlier this year called Form Xtract, which is AI driven. And when we started out on the path of let's build something with AI, so as it was a blank slate, like we could think about and dream about any type of product, or service or feature or what have you. And we were able to answer a question that our customers kept asking us, and it took some iterations to get to that point. But I'm kind of, I want to know, from your standpoint, were you guys always on this path? Did you see a problem that AI was the tool? Did you want to do AI and find a way to apply it? How did you guys approach this?
Cormac Murphy 21:30
Yeah, I think that the reason it was so important to us was really what we were talking about that that access to data, to expect somebody in this space to learn how to pull every report, run analytics, do all of that. It's just too much to ask for. And so what we thought is that this is a great way at the end of the day, we could strip out all the AI features from CacheTech, and we'd be perfectly happy as solution. Fact, probably the bigger power users are less heavy users of the AI portions of it. It's the client facing roles, people like that, that need that act data at their fingertips.
And we thought that AI was a great way to have someone interface with what is a complex platform, we didn't want to just to be a chat bot or something like that, we want to really say like, hey, I need to know about this, this and this. And it's going and it's building SQL queries, hitting a database, pulling those reports out for you. That's actually a fairly expensive job that you have at your firm that you don't advise or space you, you have a question like that maybe once a month, every other month.
And so you're either just like, whatever, it's not that important. But we want to say is like, yeah, maybe it isn't to have this every day at your fingertips. But in those situations that it is valuable, let's make sure that you have an easy way to access your data and make powerful decisions for your business and for your clients.
Richard Walker 22:57
Yeah, so you're talking to somebody who has built those queries. I mean, I'm a technologist. So I've built a lot of Aquarius for our own company, to get the insights. And it is hard, it is really, really hard to do it right. And it's costly, because it takes a lot of time. And then if you build it once, and somebody wants to report a second time, now you got to figure out how to publish it, make it exposed in the system. These are not easy things. And it feels like your AI has created a massive shortcut for you and your users to get to what they want.
Cormac Murphy 23:26
Exactly that that was the goal. And I think to even from just the work environment, it sounds like you've built those reports, there is nothing worse than working on a report until 11 at night midnight, you finally get it done. You go to your morning meeting and they're like, Wouldn't it be better this data point? Actually, you're like, up all night, live with this?
Richard Walker 23:48
Yeah, there's a magic I've been building reports since the 90s. It's actually one of my hallmarks since I'm a data person. And there's a magic to trying to get customers or users to tell you what they actually want. They'll say I just want a report that gives me the data. Okay, what does it actually mean? Like, what data points do you need in this? Do you need to know this by a date range? A geography range? Oh, yeah, that'd be good. What is it you want? And you can spend so much time defining it and still not get it right?
Cormac Murphy 24:17
Yeah, I totally agree. And the thing to is, to be fair to the people requesting those reports is, it's hard to take your technology, especially like scoping out a project, really clearly defining what's going to be in it is it's a lot of work. And sometimes you just don't know something until you see it. So what we want to do is rather than driving your analysts absolutely crazy. We want to say, hey CAIT, show me, you know, new households in this zip code that have had contributions over the past three months. Oh, actually, you know, I want these boards that codes, show if they're taking distributions to and you're iterating right there and as far as I know, it's till they become sentient, the AI is not rolling its eyes. Liking its job.
Richard Walker 25:05
Oh man, again, really? So you're having users do this? Are they giving you feedback that's turning into features, or maybe even like that, because you have to write the prompt as a user. Maybe you don't want to rewrite the prompt over and over again. But you want that report over and over again, how are you taking that kind of feedback?
Cormac Murphy 25:25
Yeah. So the way it's backbone, is that some of the very generic like, the prompts of what you say that the two sentence question gets fed into a much larger context for the prompt? So what we're doing is we're really interested to know when and this is that why we want that deeper relationship with the clients. We don't want someone to throw their hands up and say, oh, this thing's dumb. We don't want to use it. It's like, hey, when it gives you a weird answer, like, we want to know, because we want to see what led it down that path? And can we do something?
We don't want to train you how to better ask it questions. We want to train it, we'll learn how to better ask it questions. But we kind of need to know when it gives you a weird answer, it doesn't work. And so that collaboration has been fun. And we know there's certain areas that are a bit more experimental, that, hey, we will kind of warn you of like, hey, in this space, you know, be a little more careful, it may not be as consistent. But we want those pipes there for it's improving so rapidly that we don't want to be behind the curve in developing as the models improve and get more and more accurate. But we do not want to force just like you don't want to force everyone to become SQL pros.
We don't want people to have to be command engineering pros for prompt engineering pros when it comes to these LLMs. We want to say, hey, it's our job to do that. That's the technology aspect of this. You tell us our needs, we'll see how you worded the question and figure out what we could have done to better prompt it to speak your language.
Richard Walker 27:00
Yeah, I'm going to be curious over time to see how prompts, how people using prompts change. And if it becomes a skill set, because like searching became a skill set. Yeah. My wife's like, she can't find anything. And she was asked me to find it. I type three words, I find it I'm like, why didn't you just find it? There these skill sets in terms of how you think. And by the way, I think the reason I'm good at search is because in college, my job was to research, I worked for an institute and I went to every library on campus manually microfiche paper, no Internet, and searched and searched and searched to find stuff. And I learned this kind of mindset, I guess. But do you have any forecasts of the future of what your AI is going to be calm or other things you're working towards?
Cormac Murphy 27:44
Yeah, I think that some of the most interesting things that we've been experimenting with is really on the generative AI side that if you look at chart creation, things like that, it's still a bit, we can create custom charts, things like that data visualizations. But it's still pretty, we're spelling out exactly how we want a chart to look right, we're actually just kind of telling it, hey, run this code and send it back to us. I think there's going to be really, really cool stuff that comes from the, if you go mess around the dolly model on, on open AI, the images and things like that, that it can create are absolutely amazing.
We've done a lot with video creation, using generative AI to create scalable, good looking videos. And integrating that into the platform is something we'd like to do. But a couple of partners that we work with. And it's incredible how fast that space is growing. And so to me what it's going to be now. And I think there's a lot of people that are doing a pretty good job that the strongest implementations I see from AI are kind of that they want to marry things together. So we know you're going to need to customize content, we know you're going to have to put your own spins on it. But let's get a draft in front of you. And then you focus on the editing and the fine tuning as opposed to starting from scratch, which can even just be tough, sitting down and thinking about it right?
If you're staring at something or your gears start turning faster. So I think really focusing on how are you going to use that true generative aspect, you start creating content at scale and meaningful, impactful content and bring up just like we did with the investment policy statements. We want to make sure that this enables better human intervention, as opposed to totally takes it away.
Richard Walker 29:29
Yeah, one of the things I'm looking for is for these generative AIs to use repetitive templates and their design of visualizations. Because if you ask it to produce a chart, it might use blue, green, red, and the next time it produces it's orange, purple and blue. And how do you get it to be standardized from client to client experience to experience or rerun this change something and it gives you a totally different image. So I'm looking to the day when they can remember how they did it and just tweak just iterate on some of these designs. Maybe I'm naive, maybe it's possible now.
Cormac Murphy 30:04
Oh, it is a challenge, right? And that has to do with the way contexts and things like that are sent back and forth between it because if you do, we talked about Dali, which is like, incredible tool, but it's exactly what you say, hey, I love that image. Can you just tweak this and it's a new image. But the reason is, is because it can't take that image back in, it's not aware, that was the big step forward with the chat is it is aware of that prior history that entire chat goes back into it, it re engages on what the context of the conversation is. So it feels a bit more natural. If you do look that the 4.0 model, though, has done a ton on the image recognition side.
So I would if you want to just have your mind blown, go watch the most recent announcement video, and you'll see they're interacting with video having it help them with math equations that they're writing. And I do think that is going to be the big step forward is taking it beyond the chat beyond simple data extraction, and really getting into build me this chart, make it look this way, iterate on that. It's good with words, on even the words, for the most part, I find you can get pretty different answers. If you're saying like just tweak it a little, I think it will continue to get better and better at that, especially on the image side. It's something we're very, very excited for.
Richard Walker 31:22
Man. Cormac, I would love to keep talking about AI, I have a totally different type of question to ask you, though. I think you're somewhat unique in the sense that you spun out this company, it doesn't sound like you're trying to raise the next venture capital tranche or anything like that. What are you spending your time on as CEO? Where do you send your focus and have the most struggle and challenges maybe?
Cormac Murphy 31:45
Yeah, I think for me, my biggest challenges are, I'm a nerd at heart. So I love the coding, I love learning the new technologies. And so getting into that more sales focused roles, things like that have been a challenge for me, and that it's just, I want to dive in and be a nerd, which I think you know, sometimes your greatest strengths or your biggest weakness, is there something why I think that that leadership style will always continue to make this a very innovative platform, because I think it's cool. So, with that, I think those are some of our bigger challenges.
What I'm spending my time doing now is, we are focused very much at getting brand awareness out there. But continuing to make sure we are not pivoting to drop everything into a sales model. It's, hey, we need to keep progressing. But it is time for us to spread our wings get better name brand recognition out there and focusing on that, which is a fun challenge. I'm enjoying it. And I'm learning a lot in the process.
Richard Walker 32:52
Yeah, given that your model is to really work closely with each customer, you're probably doing something that I learned, which is you win each customer one by one, I don't care if it's a firm with 100 users, 1000 users or one user, it's still a one by one sale, and every sale matters to that customer. So it should matter to you regardless what size they are.
Cormac Murphy 33:14
Yeah, definitely. And I think that that's another advantage, I think we have over some competitors that kind of came in it from a more venture-backed FinTech thought process is at the end of the day, there actually aren't that many advisors, right. And so you're gonna be successful in this space by having, there's no such thing as a billion users, like a Facebook or something, 100% market would be, you'd have 20 30,000 users excluding some of the bigger firms. So this isn't this massive space, that we're going to see those relationships, you're going to live and die on them.
And every customer is going to be a substantial portion of your overall of your total clientele. And you need to approach it in that manner of like, not just from, it's the right thing to do. But also that will ultimately be the success of your business. Technology people can catch up, right, it's at the end of the day, even we've seen, some of the best technologies haven't changed that much over time. It's that they just constantly got a little better for their users got were really good at engaging, making sure people really knew how to use the tool that was out there instead of rewriting things every two years or something to look last year or incorporate some flashy bell or whistle.
Richard Walker 34:36
Yeah, yeah. Man, I'd love to keep talking to you. But we got to have to wrap this up. And before we do before I ask my last question, what's the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Cormac Murphy 34:46
Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. So Cormac, there's very few of us out there, so I've kind of easy to find that way. And then our website, cachetech.io, we're from Cache Valley, Utah, so kind of took that name from there. So if no one's ever been there, it's an absolutely beautiful place, I'd highly recommend visiting. So those are two best ways to get a hold of me. Email, LinkedIn, or the website.
Richard Walker 35:18
So I suppose the mountains in your logo reflect the mountains that you're in?
Cormac Murphy 35:22
Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Richard Walker 35:24
That's cool. All right, here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?
Cormac Murphy 35:30
Yeah. So for me, it was one of my longest-term boss at Schwab. And his name's David Castor. And I actually was able to convince him to come join the Adams team after he had to kind of he's a bit older. So once his shares vested and all of this stuff at Schwab, I was able to convince him to come to the RIA space.
But David was a guy that, and it's really impacted my leadership style is bring people in, hire people that know what they're doing, and that have a passion. And then you support them in that and allow them that room and that ability to be creative. Don't jam someone into pigeonhole somebody, and you let them flourish. And it creates a really fun work environment, and you get better work product out of it. So I really strive to model myself after that leadership style.
Richard Walker 36:23
So that speaks to me so much, because I believe our job is to empower others to do their best work. And we bring people into our team and let them do their best work. And the amazing thing is when they get to do their best work, they enjoy it. So they love their job. People around them are happier, customers are happier, and you get their best work. I mean, you can't ask for more right?
Cormac Murphy 36:45
With our team, my biggest struggle as a manager is I'll be looking at messages going back and forth on the weekend. I'm like, hey, guys, it's the weekend. Like, everyone was so engaged and building something cool. And it's fun. It's a lot of fun. And I think that it's important to maintain that culture.
Richard Walker 37:03
Oh, that's great, man. Congratulations. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Cormac Murphy, CEO of CacheTech Advisor Solutions for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Cormac's website at cachetech.io. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion, will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Cormac, thank you so much for joining me today.
Cormac Murphy 37:31
Thank you, Rich. It's great to be on.
Outro 37:33
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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