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RIA Collective: Sam Sova | AI Coworkers Are Changing Advisory Firms · RIA Collective

• 0:16
  Charlie van Derven: Thank you for joining me on another episode of RIA, a Collective.
• 0:19
  Charlie van Derven: I'm your host, as always, Charlie van Derven.
• 0:22
  Charlie van Derven: We're going in a little bit of a different direction with with this particular episode.
• 0:26
  Charlie van Derven: Where those of you who have listened in the past, typically what we do is we're helping advisors transition into an independent space increase the trust in the industry, where I think that fiduciary role within an RIA certainly is impactful for some of the trust issues that financial services suffers.
• 0:42
  Charlie van Derven: Today we'll go in a little different direction because I met a gentleman along the way named Sam Sova.
• 0:47
  Charlie van Derven: Sam, welcome.
• 0:49
  Sam Sova: Thanks for having
• 0:49
  Charlie van Derven: me.
• 0:50
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, you got it, man.
• 0:51
  Charlie van Derven: So Sam runs a a company called Subatomic ai, and from what I can tell, there's some tools out there in the industry.
• 0:57
  Charlie van Derven: Of course, it's in its infancy but there's some AI tools in the industry that are doing some things.
• 1:02
  Charlie van Derven: Sam, jump Zox.
• 1:04
  Charlie van Derven: Those are, some of the call recording and CRM integrations that we see a lot of.
• 1:09
  Charlie van Derven: You've taken it a little bit beyond, beyond what I'll call the tip of the iceberg with those tools.
• 1:15
  Charlie van Derven: And, I don't know, from what I can tell, saving advisors hundreds of hours a year dozens of hours a month and meeting prep.
• 1:22
  Charlie van Derven: That's an exciting use case scenario.
• 1:25
  Charlie van Derven: And so I just wanna dive into that and, make our listeners aware of some of the front edge, front end tools that are out there, I should say, front edge tools that are out there because you guys are leading the way.
• 1:34
  Charlie van Derven: Very much sam.
• 1:35
  Charlie van Derven: Welcome, man.
• 1:36
  Charlie van Derven: I do appreciate you spending some time with us and our listeners at RIA Collective.
• 1:40
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 1:40
  Sam Sova: Thanks again for having me, Charlie.
• 1:42
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, you got it.
• 1:42
  Charlie van Derven: And we come from the same stomping grounds before we hit record.
• 1:45
  Charlie van Derven: We were talking about cold, but Sam's in Wisconsin.
• 1:47
  Charlie van Derven: I grew up in Wisconsin, so I don't think we talked about it, but maybe we got some Green Bay packer affiliation.
• 1:52
  Charlie van Derven: Hopefully not Chicago bears,
• 1:54
  Sam Sova: yes, absolutely.
• 1:55
  Charlie van Derven: Packers
• 1:55
  Sam Sova: all the way.
• 1:56
  Charlie van Derven: Very good, man.
• 1:57
  Charlie van Derven: Very good.
• 1:58
  Charlie van Derven: I don't know if I told you on our call, Sam, I brought a packer player to third grade show and tell.
• 2:04
  Sam Sova: I have a story for you too.
• 2:05
  Sam Sova: I actually Ray Nitschke watched me and my friends in first grade play football.
• 2:10
  Sam Sova: That's my story.
• 2:10
  Sam Sova: Very cool.
• 2:12
  Charlie van Derven: My first job outta a college, and we're gonna go quick through this 'cause I want to get into subatomic.
• 2:15
  Charlie van Derven: My first job outta a college was at a Radisson Inn in Green Bay, which is where all the personalities in town would stay when they came for NFL games.
• 2:23
  Charlie van Derven: And and got a chance to meet Ray Tke shortly before he passed away.
• 2:27
  Charlie van Derven: And a whole bunch of Packer players and all the NFL people like John Madden and Pat Summerall that would come through town.
• 2:32
  Charlie van Derven: And so anyway,
• 2:33
  Sam Sova: love that.
• 2:33
  Charlie van Derven: I was extremely starstruck.
• 2:35
  Charlie van Derven: I think, I'd be more starstruck over that than than a Hollywood celebrity not Absolutely.
• 2:39
  Charlie van Derven: It's just my bias in life.
• 2:41
  Sam Sova: Awesome.
• 2:41
  Sam Sova: I'm
• 2:41
  Charlie van Derven: jealous.
• 2:42
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, man.
• 2:42
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, man, that's awesome.
• 2:43
  Charlie van Derven: Let's jump in, man.
• 2:44
  Charlie van Derven: Listen I I would.
• 2:45
  Charlie van Derven: Say, what was it you?
• 2:46
  Charlie van Derven: You can correct me if I'm wrong, but chat GPT launched November 22, I believe it was, might've been 21 if we've been using it that long, whatever it was by January, 2023.
• 2:57
  Charlie van Derven: So a couple months later we were monitoring what that was all about and we started incorporating AI into social advisors, specifically content creation.
• 3:05
  Charlie van Derven: Was the simplest way to jump into it.
• 3:08
  Charlie van Derven: It changed the way I do business.
• 3:10
  Charlie van Derven: It changed the way we structured our business.
• 3:12
  Charlie van Derven: Here we are, three years beyond that.
• 3:15
  Charlie van Derven: Sam, you've got your finger on the pulse more than I do.
• 3:18
  Charlie van Derven: Dude, I'm stoked to hear about Subatomic and dive into some of the details.
• 3:22
  Charlie van Derven: So how did you, first off, you I grew up in this industry, from doing websites way back in the day To where we are today.
• 3:30
  Charlie van Derven: How did you choose financial services as where you wanted to stake your, stake your flag and jump in with an AI tool?
• 3:37
  Sam Sova: Yeah, sure.
• 3:38
  Sam Sova: So we started in 2023, and I have a co-founder, his name's Carl Simon.
• 3:41
  Sam Sova: He is our CTO.
• 3:43
  Sam Sova: And Carl was building complex projects.
• 3:45
  Sam Sova: I was doing more of the consulting side.
• 3:47
  Sam Sova: We come from the Fortune five hundreds doing the same thing, figuring out challenges, how do you solve 'em with technology?
• 3:53
  Sam Sova: And that's really what we were doing at the early stages of ai.
• 3:56
  Sam Sova: And what we found very quickly, you start talking to your network and your friends, and we found out that after talking to hundreds of leaders in this industry, there were common problems that we could really address with this long term.
• 4:09
  Sam Sova: That were not just point and click solutions, right?
• 4:11
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 4:12
  Sam Sova: That were major pain points, not just for efficiency, but to really drive growth in an industry that is completely changing.
• 4:20
  Sam Sova: So that's where we started.
• 4:22
  Charlie van Derven: Very cool, man.
• 4:23
  Charlie van Derven: I one of the things that keeps a lot of people out of financial services is compliance.
• 4:27
  Charlie van Derven: And so I think we need to talk a little bit about that today.
• 4:30
  Charlie van Derven: But before we dive in, what were some of those problems that you and you and Carl identified that you guys, were positioned to create solutions for?
• 4:37
  Sam Sova: Yeah, at a macro level, when you think about technology, it was, Hey, we're experimenting with ai.
• 4:43
  Sam Sova: But it's, it's just another tool to the tool set.
• 4:46
  Sam Sova: So I have 15 tools I have to log into every day.
• 4:48
  Sam Sova: Now I'm adding 16, 17, 18.
• 4:51
  Sam Sova: The tools we have some AI capabilities, but they're just kinda wrappers on the current tool that we have.
• 4:57
  Sam Sova: It's not moving the needle.
• 4:59
  Sam Sova: They don't move they don't actually work into our workflows.
• 5:03
  Sam Sova: And I just don't have this unified view of our data, which I feel, and this is comments we got, the people we talked to felt like that should be possible now with ai.
• 5:13
  Sam Sova: So that's where we started.
• 5:15
  Sam Sova: And then at a macro level, just 41%, it depends where you look, but the stat I have, 41% of advisor time is spent on tasks that.
• 5:24
  Sam Sova: Quite frankly, we don't believe they have to do anymore.
• 5:26
  Sam Sova: They need to be in front of clients.
• 5:28
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 5:28
  Sam Sova: And that is where the value is in this space is relationships.
• 5:32
  Sam Sova: And that's what we've no questions over and over.
• 5:34
  Sam Sova: So when we talk about growth, like what we're creating and what I'm gonna talk about further with you, Charlie, is really to break through that growth ceiling where we can do more with same, right?
• 5:44
  Sam Sova: So we can grow without necessarily hiring incremental people to do backend work.
• 5:50
  Sam Sova: Which I think is extremely interesting to all the RAs that we talked to.
• 5:55
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 5:55
  Charlie van Derven: I'm sure, man, and I we're gonna talk a little bit about meeting prep.
• 5:58
  Charlie van Derven: Sure.
• 5:58
  Charlie van Derven: I can only imagine, if you've got, 150 clients and pot, potentially that's 300 review meetings a year.
• 6:05
  Charlie van Derven: One for just about every day when you pull the weekends out.
• 6:08
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 6:08
  Charlie van Derven: There's gotta be an hour of prep, whether it's assistant or the advisor themselves.
• 6:14
  Charlie van Derven: Putting time into meeting prep, and I know we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about that.
• 6:18
  Charlie van Derven: And just, in, in that, in that scenario, of course they've gotta review everything, so maybe it's 15 minutes instead of an hour, but in that scenario, you're saving hundreds, 200, 300 hours a year.
• 6:30
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 6:30
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 6:31
  Sam Sova: So let's you wanna dig into that?
• 6:32
  Sam Sova: We can dig into meeting prep and some of the other things.
• 6:35
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 6:35
  Charlie van Derven: There, there's a couple things that I, I wanna make sure we talked about meeting prep.
• 6:38
  Charlie van Derven: I also when we were getting acquainted you talked about the client or the prospect journey and, more touch points, but also more meaningful touch points, right?
• 6:45
  Charlie van Derven: Based on who that person is versus.
• 6:47
  Charlie van Derven: We do a lot of marketing automation, and in, in many cases, the message is the same.
• 6:52
  Charlie van Derven: We segment people within that marketing automation, but if you fit in that segment, the messaging is the same for you as it would be the next person in that segment.
• 6:59
  Charlie van Derven: So let's start with meeting prep and then we'll get into the more touch points.
• 7:03
  Sam Sova: Yeah, and I can talk macro too, to actually, if you're okay with that.
• 7:08
  Sam Sova: I'd like to start there on how we think of this and then roll in a meeting prop.
• 7:11
  Sam Sova: Dude, it's
• 7:11
  Charlie van Derven: Your time.
• 7:13
  Sam Sova: So I, so we, just taking a step back, we think AI is almost at that 1995 moment.
• 7:19
  Sam Sova: We talked about this a little bit, Charlie, right?
• 7:21
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 7:21
  Sam Sova: Like email come, comes up websites and like we when that happened.
• 7:28
  Sam Sova: Nobody really had the context to what was going to come next.
• 7:32
  Sam Sova: And what came next was dramatic, right?
• 7:35
  Sam Sova: You had social media, you had the iPhone, Blackberry, you had different hardware and work changed forever after that, right?
• 7:42
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 7:43
  Sam Sova: I don't think anybody can argue that.
• 7:44
  Sam Sova: Work and our lives change.
• 7:46
  Sam Sova: We actually think the same thing with ai, right?
• 7:49
  Sam Sova: So many people are thinking of this as just the next phase of technology of what they're currently doing, hence the wrappers.
• 7:55
  Sam Sova: And some point and click solutions, like note takers, they're great, but that's not gonna dramatically change the growth trajectory of your IRA.
• 8:04
  Sam Sova: So we think of this as like this is the pivotal moment that it's going to change.
• 8:08
  Sam Sova: So what is the first thing you have to do, right?
• 8:11
  Sam Sova: You have to unify our data.
• 8:13
  Sam Sova: RAs in general have 15 different tools that they're accessing on a regular basis to get client information.
• 8:21
  Sam Sova: So the way we look at it is you don't have to get rid of your tools.
• 8:24
  Sam Sova: You already trust these tools a lot of them you need to use to make transactions and so on.
• 8:29
  Sam Sova: So we orchestrate across all those tools, essentially create what those are familiar with of a data warehouse, data lake.
• 8:37
  Sam Sova: Put a vector store on top of it, which makes it easy for AI to access.
• 8:42
  Sam Sova: And when we do that, we have one view of our entire business.
• 8:46
  Sam Sova: More importantly, one view of every customer.
• 8:48
  Sam Sova: And now when you incorporate AI meeting prep you now have access to be able to do that in a matter of seconds versus ours.
• 8:57
  Sam Sova: And that's how we look at it.
• 8:58
  Sam Sova: We look at AI as.
• 9:00
  Sam Sova: The fundamental thing you need to do is this orchestration and then the possibilities of what we do next to significantly grow the business is really endless of the possibilities we can do.
• 9:12
  Charlie van Derven: That's pretty cool.
• 9:12
  Charlie van Derven: So when we talk about tools, we're obviously talking about CRM, right?
• 9:15
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 9:15
  Charlie van Derven: Redtail Wealthbox and Salesforce derivatives.
• 9:18
  Charlie van Derven: And then, for a lot of our clients they've got a client, CRM, and then they've got a prospect, CRM.
• 9:23
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, we are, we're a reseller.
• 9:25
  Charlie van Derven: Go high level.
• 9:26
  Charlie van Derven: But there's other, there's other good platforms out there portfolio tools, right?
• 9:30
  Charlie van Derven: Orion and, black Diamond and these types of portfolio management tools.
• 9:35
  Charlie van Derven: What else do you put in there?
• 9:37
  Sam Sova: Custodial platforms.
• 9:38
  Charlie van Derven: Custodial platforms,
• 9:39
  Sam Sova: right.
• 9:39
  Sam Sova: Email.
• 9:40
  Sam Sova: Email.
• 9:40
  Sam Sova: Most RAs have now dabbled with note takers, right?
• 9:44
  Charlie van Derven: Yep.
• 9:44
  Sam Sova: Client communications via email, RingCentral, if we're using that for text.
• 9:49
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 9:49
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 9:49
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 9:50
  Sam Sova: It goes on.
• 9:50
  Sam Sova: The way that we've orchestrated this is like API connections are not good enough, right?
• 9:56
  Sam Sova: Because if.
• 9:57
  Sam Sova: Something on the endpoint changes or something with the host changes, like it breaks everything.
• 10:03
  Sam Sova: So we, so I mentioned co-founder Carl, our CTO.
• 10:08
  Sam Sova: His background is deep in data and integrations for the last 25 years or so.
• 10:14
  Sam Sova: So like we built this platform knowing that.
• 10:17
  Sam Sova: APIs weren't gonna cut it.
• 10:19
  Sam Sova: So we have proprietary technology where we can use what we call AI coworkers to actually go in and get all this data in the platforms that APIs, F-S-F-T-P servers, et cetera, just don't get us to give that full view.
• 10:33
  Sam Sova: And now we can pull it into one centralized area and orchestrate AI across that.
• 10:38
  Sam Sova: That to us, that is the sweet spot where.
• 10:41
  Sam Sova: Growth is inevitable for whoever does that.
• 10:44
  Charlie van Derven: That's awesome, man.
• 10:45
  Charlie van Derven: That's awesome.
• 10:46
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 10:46
  Charlie van Derven: So where do you wanna start?
• 10:47
  Charlie van Derven: You wanna talk about meeting prep, you wanna
• 10:48
  Sam Sova: talk about points?
• 10:49
  Sam Sova: Sure.
• 10:49
  Sam Sova: So like that example is great.
• 10:50
  Sam Sova: We, in listening to the market, we know that meeting prep is just a complete time suck, but it's necessary.
• 10:58
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 10:58
  Sam Sova: So if you think about what I just explained of orchestrating all your data, so let's think about.
• 11:03
  Sam Sova: Client, let's say Jane Smith.
• 11:05
  Sam Sova: Jane Smith is in our CRM.
• 11:07
  Sam Sova: We have emails, we have texts we have maybe some calls we've recorded.
• 11:11
  Sam Sova: We have our custodial data and then all these other ancillary tools, Charlie, like you mentioned, right?
• 11:16
  Sam Sova: So what we're able to do is take all that information and now create an agenda for a meeting.
• 11:23
  Sam Sova: It can be anything that an organization wants from two pages.
• 11:28
  Sam Sova: To 10 pages to visual.
• 11:30
  Sam Sova: The output is now actually fairly easy with the AI platform that we built, right?
• 11:36
  Sam Sova: Because we have AI building this, that can be done faster than ever.
• 11:39
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 11:39
  Sam Sova: We can do it in a dashboard, et cetera.
• 11:42
  Sam Sova: But now what we can do is we can actually have one of our AI coworkers go in the calendars of all the advisors.
• 11:48
  Sam Sova: And a week before the meeting, send all their agendas for them to review ahead of time and then collaborate with our AI team.
• 11:56
  Sam Sova: We call it AI coworkers, to make any modifications right ahead of the meeting.
• 12:00
  Sam Sova: Sync the data to be real time, and they walk into that meeting ready to go.
• 12:05
  Sam Sova: And it's not just automation.
• 12:06
  Sam Sova: What we're talking about is AI actually making recommendations of what you should talk about based on age.
• 12:12
  Sam Sova: Maybe where they live.
• 12:14
  Sam Sova: Maybe they're where they're at in life, if they have kids in college, things like that, right?
• 12:18
  Sam Sova: So it's not just pure automation, it's actually having our AI coworkers think and make recommendations for us.
• 12:25
  Sam Sova: It's pretty impressive.
• 12:27
  Charlie van Derven: That's pretty awesome.
• 12:27
  Charlie van Derven: And I'm sure, as with anything, when you've got human involvement there's even, even if a seasoned advisor or a seasoned assistant is pulling notes together, there's gonna be gaps left.
• 12:37
  Charlie van Derven: Right?
• 12:37
  Charlie van Derven: Based on their biases, based on things they're not even considering.
• 12:40
  Charlie van Derven: Maybe they didn't look at the last three emails before they jumped into that meeting.
• 12:45
  Charlie van Derven: That's pretty awesome, man.
• 12:46
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 12:46
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 12:47
  Sam Sova: And let me even paint a kind of a bigger picture of how we see the future, and these are things we're even doing today.
• 12:53
  Sam Sova: Memory, right?
• 12:54
  Sam Sova: Cognitive workflows.
• 12:56
  Sam Sova: Maybe some of you that are listening have read about this.
• 12:59
  Sam Sova: But we built this into our platform where it learns over time, right?
• 13:03
  Sam Sova: So as you give feedback, as an individual advisor or a at a firm level, we can build that feedback and memory into.
• 13:11
  Sam Sova: How we now give outputs in the future, right?
• 13:14
  Sam Sova: So we like to think of this again, I keep saying AI coworker, like if you're gonna hire somebody right?
• 13:21
  Sam Sova: As you hire them, you're gonna train them, you're gonna give them access to your tools and data.
• 13:26
  Sam Sova: We think about the exact same thing with how we build our AI coworkers on top of your data.
• 13:30
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 13:31
  Sam Sova: And if you hire somebody new, you're going to give them feedback along the way, right?
• 13:36
  Sam Sova: You're gonna train 'em up.
• 13:38
  Sam Sova: Same thing with our AI coworkers, but they incorporate it super fast and we'll make the changes right away.
• 13:44
  Sam Sova: And never forget the feedback that you gave 'em.
• 13:47
  Charlie van Derven: That's that's pretty awesome, man.
• 13:48
  Charlie van Derven: When you engage with an RIA Sam, what does that look like?
• 13:51
  Charlie van Derven: There's only so many tools being used in the industry, but when you start pulling six or seven different, portfolio platforms and custodial and CRMs, there's a heck of a mix.
• 14:01
  Charlie van Derven: Is that a custom fit for every RIA or have you guys developed something that kind of plug and plays?
• 14:07
  Sam Sova: So we, so it is it's tailored for every RA meaning.
• 14:12
  Sam Sova: We don't just have a set of integrations.
• 14:14
  Sam Sova: I really think that thinking is old school of just like we have integrations with these partners, again, with our AI capabilities, we're able to pull all the data into this database of whatever you want from these platforms.
• 14:27
  Sam Sova: So when we engage with the RIA, we're looking at, what are the key use cases?
• 14:32
  Sam Sova: What are your key pain points, and then what are the platforms that you use that we're gonna address those pain points with?
• 14:39
  Sam Sova: We orchestrate it.
• 14:40
  Sam Sova: We actually have internal platform called Nexus and Nucleus.
• 14:44
  Sam Sova: This is pretty crazy, Charlie, we haven't talked about this yet.
• 14:46
  Sam Sova: Where we can take a recording of that call where somebody walks through their pain points and the tools that they have, we can then create an integration plan through ai, a workflow of how they're, how it's going to work within ai.
• 15:03
  Sam Sova: We get the sign off from the customer.
• 15:05
  Sam Sova: Yep.
• 15:05
  Sam Sova: This is what we talked about.
• 15:07
  Sam Sova: And now we can actually have our AI coworkers build a team of AI coworkers highly tailored to that organization for the use cases that they have.
• 15:17
  Sam Sova: Try to wrap your head around that, right?
• 15:18
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 15:19
  Charlie van Derven: It's,
• 15:19
  Sam Sova: I mean, it's it, you're talking about like data warehousing.
• 15:23
  Sam Sova: This was like a 12 to 18 month.
• 15:26
  Sam Sova: Thing even six months ago.
• 15:29
  Sam Sova: This currently for some people that we talked to.
• 15:31
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 15:31
  Sam Sova: And we're talking three months maybe.
• 15:34
  Sam Sova: That's
• 15:34
  Charlie van Derven: awesome.
• 15:35
  Sam Sova: So speed, velocity, we have this, our CTOI gotta give Carl credit for this.
• 15:40
  Sam Sova: Adapt, evolve, and scale.
• 15:41
  Sam Sova: That's how we think about our organization, but we think about our clients, right?
• 15:45
  Sam Sova: So as they adapt and they evolve, we're able to scale with them, with what we're doing in the capabilities we've built internally to move super fast as they grow.
• 15:54
  Charlie van Derven: That is awesome, man.
• 15:55
  Charlie van Derven: Subatomics doing some fun stuff, dude.
• 15:57
  Sam Sova: Clearly, I'm pretty excited about it.
• 15:59
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, me too.
• 16:00
  Charlie van Derven: Me too.
• 16:01
  Charlie van Derven: What a, yeah, it was a aple, a pleasure to meet you when we did.
• 16:04
  Charlie van Derven: And and I, we're exposed to, like you said, that kind of, that, I don't mean to be, I don't mean this to sound negative, it probably will, but I don't, that's not how I intended it.
• 16:11
  Charlie van Derven: But we're at the tip of the iceberg when we look at tools like Jump and Zox and some of these common tools in the industry, which, I'll tell you what, when an advisor sits down and looks at their capability and it's gonna record my calls, it's gonna dump my CRM know it's gonna draft me an email.
• 16:27
  Charlie van Derven: Already, they're looking at saving how many hundreds of hours a year.
• 16:31
  Charlie van Derven: You guys take it to the next level with meeting prep and, automated touch points throughout
• 16:36
  Sam Sova: a journey.
• 16:37
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 16:37
  Sam Sova: Boarding.
• 16:37
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 16:37
  Sam Sova: So I think I, one more thing I really want to hit here is I think the traditional way we think about software.
• 16:44
  Sam Sova: We've proven completely changed it.
• 16:46
  Sam Sova: It has completely changed with ai, meaning you get a demo and you gotta fit into this box of what's been shown to you,
• 16:53
  Charlie van Derven: right?
• 16:54
  Sam Sova: We literally had a request, Hey, can you show us some dashboarding capabilities that you have?
• 17:00
  Sam Sova: And we're like, sure.
• 17:01
  Sam Sova: What do you want to see?
• 17:02
  Sam Sova: They laid out what they wanted to see, literally 24 hours later within.
• 17:06
  Sam Sova: Our internal capabilities, nexus and Nucleus, we spun up a dashboard with dummy data, exactly how they wanted.
• 17:12
  Sam Sova: You could click into it.
• 17:14
  Sam Sova: This is completely changing everything, which is why I went back to 95 and think that, in their mid nineties.
• 17:21
  Sam Sova: Because this is the pace we're moving at.
• 17:24
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 17:24
  Charlie van Derven: And I, I've shared with you on our conversations, I started putting websites together.
• 17:28
  Charlie van Derven: I was on the sales and marketing side.
• 17:29
  Charlie van Derven: That was, it was in 1998 and was with a company that was doing wirehouse website.
• 17:34
  Charlie van Derven: So we get a contract with a big firm, and then, our resale, our opportunities were with the advisors.
• 17:40
  Charlie van Derven: Due to 98 people didn't want to pay 25 bucks a month for a website.
• 17:44
  Charlie van Derven: And now it's such an integral part and maybe it's even fading out at this point, but
• 17:48
  Sam Sova: yeah.
• 17:49
  Charlie van Derven: Here we are 27 years later.
• 17:51
  Charlie van Derven: Pains me to say a little bit.
• 17:53
  Charlie van Derven: But and for the last decade and two, two and a half decades, it's been a central point of their business.
• 17:58
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 17:59
  Sam Sova: And we, and but we think of this as equating it to hires, right?
• 18:03
  Sam Sova: So you shouldn't think of this as we're buying new software.
• 18:07
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 18:07
  Sam Sova: We're actually hiring ai.
• 18:09
  Sam Sova: That's how we think of it.
• 18:10
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 18:10
  Sam Sova: And that's how it's going to work.
• 18:11
  Sam Sova: And we're actually not saying bring us in and we're gonna, we're gonna cut a bunch of people.
• 18:15
  Sam Sova: We're saying, let's think about how we do more with the same, let's reallocate people that are doing this, heavy lifting and move them more to the front of the house potentially.
• 18:26
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 18:26
  Sam Sova: Love that relationship.
• 18:27
  Sam Sova: Driven more touch points.
• 18:28
  Sam Sova: That's critical.
• 18:29
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 18:29
  Charlie van Derven: Love that.
• 18:29
  Sam Sova: The relationship.
• 18:30
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 18:31
  Sam Sova: I want to hit on if you're okay with it.
• 18:33
  Sam Sova: One more thing.
• 18:33
  Sam Sova: You asked about compliance and audit.
• 18:35
  Sam Sova: Yep.
• 18:35
  Sam Sova: I didn't wanna, so from day one, again, Carl and I come from Fortune five hundred's consulting background and financial services, and we knew security and compliance was gonna be huge.
• 18:49
  Charlie van Derven: Yep.
• 18:49
  Sam Sova: Couple things about our platform.
• 18:51
  Sam Sova: One, from day one, we can actually build this within the IT infrastructure of an IRA and that's how we deploy it.
• 18:58
  Sam Sova: So your, it has complete security and boundaries on what's going on.
• 19:02
  Sam Sova: Second, we have a product that we have called Subatomic Deep Lens.
• 19:06
  Sam Sova: We'll actually be doing an actual release of this, but we just build it into every project where you can see either as a user or an admin exactly what is going on behind the scenes with these AI coworkers and how they're accessing data and getting you answers to whatever.
• 19:22
  Sam Sova: Question you have or proactively whatever they're doing for you.
• 19:25
  Sam Sova: So like complete transparency auditability, introspective, evaluation.
• 19:31
  Sam Sova: And this is core to our platform and we think trust and transparency, especially around what we're seeing now with Mt thought, that where AI agents are creating social networks and all this crazy stuff.
• 19:41
  Sam Sova: Like we need to keep.
• 19:44
  Sam Sova: Trust, security and compliance at the forefront, which is exactly where we started with this.
• 19:49
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 19:50
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 19:50
  Charlie van Derven: That's awesome.
• 19:51
  Charlie van Derven: And that, and such an important aspect for this industry, right?
• 19:54
  Charlie van Derven: It's like I said, it's an industry I've loved working in because, for a lot of reasons.
• 19:58
  Charlie van Derven: But we've been running an agency for 12, 13 years in financial services and compliance.
• 20:04
  Charlie van Derven: Keeps people out.
• 20:06
  Charlie van Derven: Agencies are very much a diamond dozen these days.
• 20:09
  Charlie van Derven: And the compliance and security financial services makes it a little more difficult to penetrate this particular industry.
• 20:15
  Charlie van Derven: Putting some insulation, there's plenty of'em out there, but putting some insulation for businesses like the one I own,
• 20:20
  Sam Sova: yeah.
• 20:20
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 20:21
  Charlie van Derven: Sam, before we close, where's it going, man?
• 20:23
  Charlie van Derven: You're giving us a snapshot of what the capabilities are today, but what's tomorrow look like?
• 20:28
  Charlie van Derven: Do we know?
• 20:29
  Sam Sova: For subatomic, you're gonna see us all over.
• 20:31
  Sam Sova: We were pretty stealth last year.
• 20:34
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 20:34
  Sam Sova: We wanted to build out a great couple use cases.
• 20:37
  Sam Sova: We have one that some people have seen.
• 20:39
  Sam Sova: We're saving a client 8,000 hours this year just on Wow.
• 20:42
  Sam Sova: Meeting prep and some of those things.
• 20:44
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 20:44
  Charlie van Derven: Wow.
• 20:45
  Sam Sova: Yeah.
• 20:45
  Sam Sova: One, $1.3 billion firm.
• 20:47
  Sam Sova: 8,000 hours.
• 20:48
  Sam Sova: They're gonna save just on meeting prep and some client.
• 20:51
  Sam Sova: Engagement type things.
• 20:53
  Sam Sova: So we're really like, you're gonna see us all around.
• 20:56
  Sam Sova: But I think again, this space we can't think of it as these point solutions and software as we've known it.
• 21:03
  Sam Sova: That's not where this is gonna go.
• 21:05
  Sam Sova: There's gonna be new hardware out there, there's gonna be completely new ways of working and we're really bullish on AI, coworkers being our collaborative partner.
• 21:17
  Sam Sova: To just help us grow and get things done and collaborate.
• 21:20
  Sam Sova: And we're excited about it.
• 21:21
  Sam Sova: And like I said, we're extremely bullish on it.
• 21:24
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, dude.
• 21:24
  Charlie van Derven: That it, it is very exciting.
• 21:25
  Charlie van Derven: So you guys are taking it another step as to what, what the industry has seen so far.
• 21:30
  Charlie van Derven: Dude, I'm excited to see where Subatomic goes.
• 21:32
  Charlie van Derven: We
• 21:33
  Sam Sova: will stay in touch.
• 21:34
  Sam Sova: I'll keep giving you updates, Charlie.
• 21:35
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, for sure, man.
• 21:37
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, I appreciate it.
• 21:38
  Charlie van Derven: And I'll make sure that I'm following you on LinkedIn so I can see updates there.
• 21:41
  Charlie van Derven: And I don't do a lot of, I don't do a lot of conferences anymore.
• 21:44
  Charlie van Derven: Part of me misses that part of it, there's FOMO there, so maybe we jump back into a conference, conference circuit, but I'm sure we'll see you guys around.
• 21:51
  Charlie van Derven: Main stage boost, whatever it is, right?
• 21:54
  Charlie van Derven: Gotta get that.
• 21:55
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah,
• 21:55
  Sam Sova: absolutely.
• 21:55
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah.
• 21:56
  Charlie van Derven: We'll be all
• 21:56
  Sam Sova: over the place.
• 21:57
  Charlie van Derven: I'm excited to help you get the name out in any way I can, man.
• 22:00
  Charlie van Derven: I've got we've got a little bit of a network we built over the years awesome.
• 22:03
  Charlie van Derven: So hap happy to introduce Subatomic to it.
• 22:05
  Sam Sova: Fantastic.
• 22:06
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah,
• 22:07
  Sam Sova: it was great connecting with you one wisconsinite to another.
• 22:10
  Charlie van Derven: Yeah, man.
• 22:11
  Charlie van Derven: Go pack our or something.
• 22:12
  Charlie van Derven: Sam Sova, thank you so much for being my guest on RIA Collective.
• 22:17
  Charlie van Derven: And for our listeners, thanks for taking taking some time to meet my new friend, Sam, and learn a little bit about Subatomic.
• 22:22
  Charlie van Derven: Maybe maybe AI helps us change the the trust issues within financial services.
• 22:26
  Charlie van Derven: Sam, let's see if we work.
• 22:27
  Charlie van Derven: I
• 22:27
  Sam Sova: think it will.
• 22:28
  Charlie van Derven: I hope so, man.
• 22:29
  Charlie van Derven: I hope so.
• 22:30
  Sam Sova: All right.
• 22:31
  Charlie van Derven: Thanks, Sam.
• 22:31
  Charlie van Derven: Appreciate it, dude.