Meet Lydia: Alai Studios and Shaping Wealth Deploy Next-Gen AI to Usher in The Future of Financial Advice
Lydia, an AI-powered behavioral finance assistant, helps financial advisors better understand the emotional needs of clients and provides increasingly personalized financial guidance
LOS ANGELES & CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Alai Studios and Shaping Wealth announced today the launch of Lydia, the future of financial advice. Leveraging AI technology and capabilities combined with behavioral finance content and coaching, Lydia will revolutionize how financial advisors engage their clients and build their practices. Lydia is a bulwark against industry trends toward commoditization by augmenting advisors’ human skills in emotional intelligence, decision-making, collaboration, and coaching. Best-in-class financial guidance channels technical expertise alongside wisdom and insight into the financial underpinnings of a meaningful life. As an always-on, meticulously trained companion, Lydia is the missing piece for advisors striving toward even deeper client engagement.
Alai and Shaping Wealth are jointly committed to a “human first” approach to financial guidance, ensuring that AI’s implementation into wealth management amplifies human brilliance. As a result, Lydia is a significant departure from traditional “fintech” applications, which prioritize automation over augmentation. Lydia brings out the best in advisors to help their clients achieve financial well-being. Lydia understands that AI, in its best expression, elevates humanity.
Lydia currently engages advisors through three “conversational agents” with emergent intelligence in three separate themes: 1) Navigating hard conversations, 2) Behavioral marketing, and 3) Funded contentment (money and happiness). Financial advisors who leverage Lydia benefit from tailored, practical content designed to enhance their effectiveness. Lydia meets advisors where they are in their day-to-day of navigating complex markets, overwhelming client obligations, and an ever-changing financial planning landscape.
Lydia is an always-on companion that stokes authentic engagement, not replaces it. Advisors can discuss specific client scenarios with Lydia, receive guidance on improved communication strategies, and learn countless new perspectives on the psychology of financial planning. Based on Shaping Wealth content, Lydia appreciates that financial planning is a deeply emotional process, in which skilled advisors play a pivotal role in providing support and guidance, helping clients navigate uncertainty and change with clarity and confidence. Lydia delivers personalized, real-time feedback, fostering emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, empathy, and leadership.
Uniquely, Lydia (unlike legacy AI platforms) remembers advisor identities and their interactions, enabling continuous follow-up on advisors’ skill development and relationship building. Via Alai’s patented technology, it learns an advisor’s distinct learning style. Many more conversational agents will be developed over time.
“Lydia is an expression of our core belief at Alai that artificial intelligence can and should amplify human brilliance,” said Andrew Smith Lewis, Founder and CEO of Alai Studios. “We identified the unique brilliance of the Shaping Wealth team and developed Lydia as a way to honor, extend, and amplify that brilliance. Now we’re excited to share Lydia and help advisors develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their clients, all while delivering an exceptional service.”
Lydia is the result of a collaboration of two interdisciplinary teams — one comprising cognitive scientists, AI developers, UX designers, and brand strategists from Alai Studios, and the other consisting of experts in behavioral finance, psychology, neuroscience, and financial planning from Shaping Wealth. This combined team’s background and expertise reflects a deep understanding of learning, behavioral science, and the intricacies of human cognition that were applied in the development of Lydia. As a result, Lydia is equipped to help financial advisors address the emotional and personalized needs of clients. Lydia is currently being tested with a limited number of advisory firms, being put through rigorous scenarios to ensure it provides a flawless experience before a wider rollout.
“At Shaping Wealth, we’re focused on transforming financial guidance’s essence through behavioral science,” said Shaping Wealth’s Founder, Brian Portnoy, Ph.D., CFA. “Lydia embodies this mission by leveraging AI not just to inform but also to genuinely enrich the advisor-client dynamic. Combined with the extensive suite of Shaping Wealth programming, Lydia illuminates the complex human emotions behind financial behaviors–and how to respond to them. This innovation can truly make a difference in people’s lives and help them achieve what we call ‘funded contentment’ – the ability to underwrite a meaningful life.”
This announcement comes in the midst of a transformative era for wealth management, where there is a notable talent shortage, a need for more effective client engagement, and an increasing openness to AI-driven advice. Adopting Lydia to enhance financial advisors’ performance addresses these immediate challenges. This is also a case study in the broader narrative of AI’s role in rejuvenating industries ripe for transformation. Alai and Shaping Wealth are leading this shift by embracing the role that technology can play in humanity’s broader search for contentment and meaning.
About Alai Studios
We are a creative AI studio that partners with ambitious brands to amplify human brilliance.
Our team brings unmatched experience from the creative and cognitive worlds to our work with AI. We believe that AI is a profoundly interdisciplinary practice. At Alai we are able to reliably create breakthrough solutions because we think outside the box and across traditional departmental lines. Collaborations with us help drive AI fluency, born from inside your company as part of a broader and strategic cultural shift.
Alai Studios is an LA-based team of creative technologists, cognitive scientists, operators, and entrepreneurs on a mission to amplify human brilliance. If you are interested in an interdisciplinary approach to AI strategy and seek a technology partner that can deliver something utterly unique, we’d love to tell you more. Find us online at: www.alaistudios.com
Alai Studios. The art + science of AI.
About Shaping Wealth
Shaping Wealth is a leading provider of learning and training solutions for the global wealth management industry, specifically in applied behavioral finance and the psychology of financial planning. Led by a team of experts in behavioral finance, psychology, neuroscience, and financial planning, Shaping Wealth develops coaching and content experiences designed to educate and inspire advice firms ranging from small RIAs to Fortune 500 companies. The firm has pioneered “human first” financial guidance through transformative programs such as Building the Behavioral Advisor and the Foundations of Behavioral Advice. To partner with Shaping Wealth in the humanizing of financial advice, visit us at www.shapingwealth.com.
Contacts
Juan Ávila
JDI for Alai Studios
[email protected]
512-589-4486
Tina Powell
Intention.ly for Shaping Wealth
[email protected]
201-212-0072
