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Steven Jarvis, CPA (00:51)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services podcast, Financial Professionals Edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA, and I’m very excited for this week’s conversation. I’m joined by Parker Ence from Jump AI, to talk about how we can use AI tools to elevate client outcomes. That’s really at the end of the day, what matters most is what we’re doing for clients. So Parker, thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome.

Parker Ence (01:16)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:18)
Now Parker, before we dive into kind of the more fun stuff of how this all works in practice, give us just a little bit of your background on how you ended up running this company that’s leading the charge on helping financial advisors specifically do more for their clients.

Parker Ence (01:32))
Yeah, for sure. I will just really quickly say, so we’re coming out to the summit, your event later this year. And I had this really fun moment because I was literally at my parents’ house for weekend dinner and my brother is a financial advisor and he’s like, hey, I’m going to this, I’m excited about this event I’m going to. And it’s like this tax event. And I was like, what’s a call? Cause I, you know, it’s like, it has to be this one. And sure enough, so I’m excited because I might get a chance to hang out with my brother at your event, which is great.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (02:00)
Well, that’s awesome. It is a good event for hanging out with brothers. My brother will be there as well. And for anyone who hasn’t signed up yet, there are a few seats left. You can go to retirementtaxservices.com. It is gonna be a full event, so we’re very excited to be in Phoenix later this year, and of course grateful for partners like you guys. So, yeah, so excited to be there. That’ll be awesome if your brother can be there as well.

Parker Ence (02:19)
Yeah, very cool. So I think the question you actually asked me was, what’s it all about around kind of AI and how advisors are using it and kind of how Jump fits into that. So if you go out and look at the adoption surveys, Kitces or T3 and there’s others, what you’ll see is two interesting things. One is there are basically no AI tools or solution on the 2024 survey results. It hadn’t quite hit the full awareness of the industry at large. And so then you look at the results for 2025, and suddenly you’ve got the category of like ChatGPT and kind of the chatbot, and it’s like 45 % adopted, right? So it went from like not being on the survey to 45 % plus, it’s probably higher than that adoption. So that’s kind what we see as the first most obvious use case that advisors are going after is how do we get kind of a safe compliant version of that large language model capability, whether it’s Copilot or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever. And so then it’s like, OK, great. Now we’ve got that. Maybe we’re even connecting it to our own data, which is great. So then what? Well, generally speaking, we’re not quite to the point where we’re ready to let AI do portfolio allocations and rebalancing on autopilot. But a really good place to start is we’ve got all these things that we have to do in a week that are not meeting with clients directly or working on investments or doing things for clients. It’s all the admin stuff, right? And it’s the pre-meeting prep. It’s the post-meeting follow-up. And so that really is how Jump got its start. We entered the market in January 2024 with a really simple idea which is let’s use this cutting-edge generative AI to automate away some of these things that we’ve always wished could be automated away but it’s been impossible because computers just weren’t there yet. And my brother and brother-in-law and others kind of encouraged us to try to say, like…

Parker Ence (04:14)
Seen ChatGpt, let’s really apply it to these advisor-specific workflows. And so, can I show up to my meeting prepared without having to dig through my notes? Can I just be present with the client without having to stress about forgetting an important factor or a directive like an actual, you know, imperative that I want to do this and not leaving that behind. And then when the meeting is over, I’ve got you know, maybe an hour of admin for every hour I spend in the meeting if it’s a substantive meeting updating the CRM, sending the recap email, getting the tasks organized for the investment team or the operations team, trying to go back through the notes and remember, I know they said something about how they want to handle this particular estate thing. What did they say about that? And trying to figure that out. Compliance documentation, all the things you got to do. And it’s been really fun to see Jump go from zero users to this last month we crossed like the 11,000 user mark. And I’d like to take some credit for that, but the reality is it’s because the magic of AI finally getting to the point where it can handle some of these things, which is a ton of fun. And so we feel pretty good about the real impact that we’re able to have with that initial product.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (05:22)
Yeah, well, whether it’s you or the team or the probably the combination thereof, I’ll give you a little more credit than that because I mean, that I was not surprisingly following that same timeline. I remember seeing the Kitces map. And then I remember I go to a lot of conferences. I speak at a lot of conferences, which I’m honored to do. And I always go around and talk to the vendors because I’m not a financial advisor myself, but I get a lot of questions about these kinds of things. So that same timeline you’re talking about about a year and a half ago now, early 2024, I started seeing all these AI tools pop up at conferences as vendor booths. And what stood out to me at first was everybody had great marketing, but I wasn’t hearing a lot of different things from advisors who are using it. Cause for me that’s what I want. That’s what I want to hear. Cause for quite a while it felt like everybody was starting to use some kind of AI tool, but nobody was passionate about which one they’re like, I use X, Y, and Z just, just cause because my because the platform I’m on already compliance approved it because my friend told me about it, but no one gave me client outcomes or really even business outcomes for why they used a particular platform until I started hearing from advisors who were on Jump. And then I started hearing these very client-specific, they could give me real examples of how not just that they’re alive, but that they save time, it was better for their team, it was more efficient. All those things were true as well. But what I started to hear was, we’re improving client outcomes
because the record keeping is more accurate, the way it gets summarized and turned into tasks, the way it gets connected to the CRM. And then it’s a combination of more of the tasks being followed through on and executed, and it’s freeing up more time for advisors to do other things. And so then I started hearing this theme from advisors who are on Jump. Now just suddenly, not just, everyone should be on AI, because it was, hey, you need to be on Jump and here’s why. And they point me to specific examples. So I mean, credit to you guys for taking a tool that’s becoming more more widely available with these large language models and really applying it specifically for advisors and how they serve their clients.

Parker Ence (07:16)
Yeah, well that’s really kind of you say and it’s been a lot of fun, and in some ways it’s kind of crazy. mean, we’re at this time last year our team was seven people and now we’re at 120, right? So it’s like, it’s really rolling and it’s been fun. And I think, you know, of course we try to figure out, well, you know, geez, why is this happening, right? What is resonated? And what we’ve been able to tell is that I think we use a certain product development approach.

Parker Ence (07:24)
Which I won’t give away too much because it’s a little bit secret sauce, but the result of it is the workflows feel very natural if you’re an advisor. It’s made for your day in the life, and that includes integrations with the rest of the advisor. TechStack, we actually just rolled out RightCapital and eMoney integrations. It makes it a lot easier to update all the data to input to be able to generate a financial plan, right? So integrations. Customizations, right? Most advisors are not actually satisfied with sounding like a generic AI robot. They want to sound like themselves. And so the ability to tailor those outputs to sound like their own style. And then I think the other piece that’s been really important, there’s still a lot of fear around, is AI safe to use? And I think there’s even still a lot of misunderstanding about how generative AI even works. so because we have now worked with some of the largest, well, really all the largest broker dealers and some of the largest RIAs, and of course these firms have large teams of lawyers and compliance professionals and risk management, it’s forced us to develop all these different options for how to deploy the AI in a way that the chief compliance officer can be happy with and sign off on that’s been really helpful. So it’s been really fun. think for us, it’s fun to see real impact, right? So you’ve got advisors coming back saying, I’m saving anywhere between one to three hours per day and then I’m reallocating that time to going out and getting more clients. Or I’m reallocating that time, I can actually slow down and do more for my clients, including by the way, man, I’ve always wanted to do more on tax, or I’ve always wanted to do more on estate, or I’ve always wanted to do more on holistic plan, you know, whatever, this frees up a little bit more time in my day, I can actually deliver on that. So that’s been really fun. so that’s been great from a time savings perspective.

Parker Ence (09:25)
Now, where we’re going with Jump is we’ve got 1.2 million conversations that have been logged in Jump so far. And so that’s a data set that’s never existed in the history of financial advice. And so we have a way now where we can take, think of it as like a scrubbed privacy-sensitive version of that data where all the PII, there’s no PII, there’s no confidential information, but we can start to do research on that and start to learn what our clients actually thinking right now across the country. I’ll just share one kind of fun example. Obviously a lot of chatter about tariffs over the last few months. We’re recording this in the middle of July, right, 2025. So a lot of chat about tariffs, a lot of chat about the big, beautiful bill.

Parker Ence (10:11)
And so, you what impact does that have on a client’s mindset? And what we found was if a client brings up tariffs, they’re three times more likely to try to deviate from their financial plan and basically say, hey, I wanna move stuff into money market or I wanna move stuff into cash. That’s good to know, right? You want to kind of be prepared for that and have your speech about staying the course, you know, ready to go for that moment. So that’s just one of a million examples of things that we can start to learn and really elevate the ability for every advisor to better be more proactive and also better able to respond to some of these things that come up.

Commercial (10:50)
retirementtaxservices.com/summit

Steven Jarvis, CPA (11:30)
Parker, I want to talk more about these insights that you can pull out because your team sent me a few other to this blow my mind and I love that I thinkJjump is going to be my new version of pictures or didn’t happen when advisors try to make claims about what they do in client meetings. I’m like, great, just show me the Jump insights like I want. I want proof of before we get more into that. I want to circle back just a little bit. And of course, I’m not asking you to give away any secret sauce here. But One of the things that’s also stood out to me as I talked to advisors and they described their experience with Jump, it seems like you guys have done a really good job of navigating kind of that, that, that scale of, of customization. And what I mean by that is sometimes you get platforms where there’s so much, the initial integration is so time consuming and labor-intensive. And it’s, it’s off-putting to a lot of advisors because they don’t, they don’t have the patience or the determination to, see through this high level of customization that can be required. And so I’d love your insight on this because what I’ve from what I’ve gathered, it really you have a good range of, hey, we can get you started fairly easily. But then I talked to advisors who will tell me about the things that they cut. In fact, you mentioned the Summit already. So I’ll bring it back up. We’ve got a couple of advisors who are going to be there who are really kind of top in the industry and what they do, who are actually going to be willing to share some of their Jump templates that they’ve created because that customization is there to make it as specific and actionable for clients as possible. So was that something that you went in knowing, hey, if we want this to be as impactful for as many people as possible, we need to kind of have this balance or is that more of just kind of a natural outcome?

Parker Ence (12:57)
Yeah, so it’s kind of interesting how it unfolded. We never really thought of ourselves as a note-taking app. I know a lot of them, there’s a lot of note-taking tools, but the first version of Jump was actually a CRM updater for updating CRM fields. So we had this ability to do deep customization from day one because we didn’t ever want to assume that we knew what fields people had set up in their CRM. And so the note actually, you know, we kind of treated that like one field in the CRM, even though obviously it’s very core to, you know, kind of the meeting. And I will admit, I believed that every advisor that we worked with would want to customize the heck out of that note. The first version of our note, it was basically a proof of concept just to say, here are some ideas to get you going. And of course, we know you’re going to want to really customize this. And I think what we’ve actually seen is it’s much more of an 80-20. I think about 80 % of our users actually just want some off-the-shelf templates that, new users would come back and they’d say, well, we want you to tell us what should be in the notes. And it’s like, well, that’s not, I don’t know, it’s kind of whatever you think should be in there. So I think where we’ve evolved to is we’ve taken kind of an Apple approach. If you think about your iPhone, you just kind of, you buy it, you get it out of the box, you turn it on, it asks you, if you want English or some other language, and then it asks you if you want to connect your Wi-Fi, and then it kind of like sets itself up after that. And that’s great, because it just works. But of course, there’s thousands of features inside the iPhone that you can go use, but they’re there for you if you want to. And so we’ve kind of taken that approach, which is we want it to be very easy and intuitive out of the box, it just works. But then, if you want to become a power user, the depth is there. You can go in and load in examples of your old emails. You can load in examples of your favorite notes. If you happen to be affiliated with a broker-dealer that’s got a certain suitability form that you’ve got to fill out every year as part of your annual client review, you can mirror that form and Jump, and it gets prefilled, right? So that’s been our, I think that’s kind where we’ve landed and I think that’s been good.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (15:10)
Well, selfishly, one of the things I’ve loved about working alongside advisors who are using Jump is it does seem to elevate that follow-through and execution that I talked about before. And so especially as we’re in a year where you mentioned the big, beautiful bill, where there are tax law changes, because I’m still a tax nerd at heart. I’m seeing as advisors are leaning into this and using something that’s so specific to helping them not just to your point, not just take notes, but make updates, have tasks, use these templates to follow through. I’m seeing much better outcomes just on the tax piece that I deal with and I can only imagine how that’s helping in other areas as well. So selfishly, I love seeing the outcome for the client because obviously your primary user is a financial advisor but you’ve mentioned impact a couple of times. At the end of the day where we’re gonna measure success, where every advisor should be measuring success of any tool they use is how does this help me better serve my clients which in turn will help me grow my business. Help my family all those kinds of things So I I did want to specifically ask from your perspective Since you mentioned the Kitces this map that that it’s incredible, but it has grown so much over the last few years It’s it’s gone from a map that you could pretty visually just here’s kind of what’s going on too, man You need your magnifying glass. So being on that on that map when somebody gets on your platform, like how how are you internally a jumper? How are you encouraging advisors to measure success of having?

Parker Ence (16:33)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. So here’s a few things. And actually, before we move on from what you just said about the big, beautiful bill. So this was actually one of the insights that Liam on our team who runs our kind of insights program, he ran this for me today because I knew we’d be talking about some tax topics. If you look at the kind of discussion about tariffs and the big, beautiful bill, of course, clients that are paying attention are wondering is this going to change my tax profile and so this is pretty interesting so if you go back and look at February about 26 % of clients that talked about taxes expressed fear okay so imagine we look at all the meetings we look at the meetings that include a conversation about taxes one-fourth of those included the client saying some kind of fear about their tax situation. And that was in February, which is like headed into tax season, right? If you look at just more recently, which is after heavy tax season is done, that’s now up to 34%, which you’d expect it would go down, right? Because like we’re through the initial wave of tax season, we probably have a plan, but it’s actually gone up. So now you’ve got about a third of those conversations about tax that’s gone up. And it’s all correlated with how much tariffs and the big, beautiful bill are kind of in the public consciousness, which is pretty. I think pretty interesting. So this is definitely something that clients are thinking about and which I think is why the work you’re doing is so important, is to be prepared for those conversations. More directly to your question, so some of the ways that our… advisors that we work with have measured ROI or have measured impact. The most obvious direct one is time savings. So the averageJjump user saves at least an hour per workday. We actually have had advisors come back and tell us they’re saving three hours per workday. Obviously those are gonna be the ones that are doing a higher volume of meetings and so they’ve got a lot of admin to get done in a day.

Parker Ence (18:20)
The second thing that we look at is… are we able to reallocate that time to do more for the clients? And this was a cool story for us. So we had an RIA that is based in California, and they were thinking about rolling out a Jump to their users. They have about 100 advisors on their team. And they did this secret A-B test, and they didn’t tell us about this. So this is like the secret A-B test. They have this data person that’s really smart who works on their team, and they compared the productivity of the advisors that were on jump compared to those that were off of jump. They hadn’t done jump yet. And again, they didn’t tell us about this. So they showed up after they’d run this test. And one thing that’s really cool about this firm is they’re very disciplined about every time they do something for a client, it gets tracked in Salesforce in its own custom object, and they call that a service deliverable.

Parker Ence (19:08)
It’s actually really good data about what work is actually getting shipped for clients. And what they found was the users that were on the Jump AI platform were delivering somewhere between 20 to 50 % more client deliverables than those who were not on the Jump platform. And in addition, this was during their surge season last fall where people are getting back, know, school’s back in session, I’m getting back to my to-do list after the summer, it’s usually when they start falling behind. And they found that the Jump users were able to caught up with their workload versus those that were not. So that’s the second one is just you know, are we increasing the amount of value that we’re adding to clients per week? And think those are probably the two main ones. The third one, I think is still a little bit new, which is how is Jump helping me improve my win rates for getting new clients, so converting prospects to clients and bringing in more held-away assets? We have some new features in Jump around scorecards. So imagine if you’re leading your firm and you’ve got this idea of what a perfect meeting looks like, you can build that in as a rubric for a scorecard. And then for your developing advisors who are still kind of getting the hang of things, it’s like real-time feedback and coaching for them to be able to understand, I forgot to ask for referrals, right? Or whatever the best practices are. So I think those are the three areas that we see most often.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (20:30)
That’s really insightful. I love how tangible that is that someone can get in and really see, this is making a difference because they’re, especially in the world of technology we live in, it can be really easy to get caught up in shiny object syndrome of, well, here’s this other flashy thing that ultimately just comes down to playing office. Like, I’m just gonna tinker around with this thing and not really know if it ever makes a difference. So I love you talking about tangible ways that advisors are seeing that impact that they can go in and measure. And I mentioned before, of starting to use when I know advisors are on Jump and starting to just ask them questions. Okay, what’s the real data because one of the first insights that Liam sent me that he had pulled out and kind of put into a visual and I think you even posted on LinkedIn recently show it was a was a survey, correct me if I get this wrong, but it was a survey asking advisors how often they thought they talked more in meetings versus the client talking more in meetings. And then you went and pulled data from real transcripts to say, okay, what’s the reality, and the self-reported was something like 87 % of advisors said, no, the client definitely talks more in a meeting than I do. And then when you pulled the data, it was almost exactly the inverse of that, that in fact, the vast majority of the time, the advisor talked most of the time. And I love that so much because, as humans, it’s so easy for us to tell ourselves stories that always paint us in the best light possible. We’re all the heroes of our own story. And so,so selfishly, even for myself, I love being able to pull back the curtain and say, okay, but what does the data say? Not the story I tell myself because it makes me feel good. What’s the data say? And I love that you have such an emphasis on being able to pull out those insights to help people elevate and do more.

Parker Ence (22:00)
Yeah, I love that one too. It’s always, because we’ll go present about AI at conferences. And I love putting up the first chart, is, 87 % advisors believe that they listen more than they talk. And yes, just as you said, it turns out it’s exactly the opposite, which is kind of funny. You know, I think another one that I think is really pertinent for this audience, you know, what are some observations around the conversations that we have about tax? And so our insights team sent a couple of these to me. One thing that’s just very interesting is that about 71% of all client meetings involve some type of conversation about tax planning, which is actually pretty wild. I mean, that’s a high number. And then the other thing that’s kind of interesting is tax planning, as you know, is involved. There’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of nuance, and there’s a lot of knowledge required. And it turns out that if you look at a bunch of different topics that an advisor might cover in the course of a meeting with their client, tax is most likely to have client questions, like client-initiated questions, where they’re actually showing up with questions about their tax situation or what about this, can I do that, compared to other types of topics. And we could probably post that in the show notes or whatever to kind of show the breakdown, but pretty interesting. And on average, five to 20 % of an average conversation is gonna be dedicated to tax, five to 20%. So there’s a range in there, but depends on the client and everything. So I think the takeaway there for this audience is, it’s definitely worth investing time in getting up to speed on tax matters because it’s a really important thing and the fact that clients are showing up with questions means it’s on their minds and there’s probably other clients that are not asking those questions that should be asking those questions, right? So I think that’s what I found that pretty fascinating.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (23:52)
And when you combine that then with your insight earlier about how many times taxes was getting brought up from a fierce standpoint, like that number is going to accelerate this year. In a year where we have tax law changes, we’re gonna see a bump now that it’s gotten passed. I would expect to see a bump this next tax filing season that’s getting implemented. But to your point there, for advisors listening, your clients have the questions. And so if you’re thinking, wow, that doesn’t make sense, my clients don’t ever ask those questions. That means that they don’t feel comfortable asking the questions. You haven’t created an environment where they think that you have the answers; they’re gonna be the resource, which is a lot of the reason we do what we do at Retirement Tax Services. A big reason that we do the Summit each year. So, super excited that the team from Jump will be there to help advisors understand both how they can get time back to focus on things like tax planning, but also then how they can just better execute and serve clients on these really important topics.

Parker Ence (24:41)
Yeah, 100%. I’ll just maybe take that one more step, which is we’ve done another analysis of if you look at conversations with prospective clients and you start to analyze what behaviors are advisors doing that then probabilistically lead to that client saying, Yes, I want to become a client compared to a similar type of conversation where they say, I’m good, I’m not gonna become a client, right? So one of the most important success factors is this concept of demonstrating some kind of quick win. And obviously, there’s some limits to what you can do in that first meeting before they become, you have a formal agreement with them, you’re not giving them, you know, kind of full on advice yet, but just identifying some kind of low-hanging fruit and demonstrating value in that intro call. And by the way, plenty of opportunities to do that on the subject of taxes, right? It’s like, hey, you know, can already see that there’s some things we can do here on your tax. For example, XYZ, I think, is a great place to start.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (25:39)
Yeah, and again, love having the data behind that because anecdotally, we’ve definitely seen that and love being able to support it with real client meetings and real prospect means converting to clients. So Parker, before we wrap up here, we’ve talked about the Summit. Obviously, people can come in and learn more there. But for those of us who are impatient, and I’m certainly on that list, I hear about something I’m excited about, I want to learn, OK, well, how do I learn more? How do I take action? So what’s the best way for advisors listening to check, Jump out, and to get started on this?

Parker Ence (Jump) (26:05)
Yeah, well, if you found some of these insights and things interesting, would definitely go to LinkedIn and follow the Jump LinkedIn page. If you just search for Jump Advisory AI, that’ll pop up. And our website is jump.ai. So J-U-M-P.ai. And then, yeah, we’ll be at the summit. So we’ll have a great time there. We have a lot of different ways for folks that are interested in testing out some of these AI capabilities. Our team is, of course, always happy to set up a trial or a demo or whatever so please please feel free to reach out and our team’s not we’re not like high-pressure cooker type you know it’s like hey let’s figure out if this is a good thing for you so we’d love to meet anybody who’s interested in doing more with AI in their firm and looking to really start to construct that Ironman suit because I think we all know AI is going to change everything and so It’s time to suit up and for those that haven’t already, you gotta start getting into it because it’s moving fast. mean, what we were doing a year ago looks like a tricycle compared to even just 365 days later, so.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (27:056)
I love that suit up. That is the best action that we can recommend to anyone. So jump.ai or go to retirement tax services comm to get your spot at the summit. Come learn all this firsthand in person at the end of September Parker thanks so much for being here and sharing your insight and thanks to you and the team at Jump for all that you’re doing for the industry really appreciate it

Parker Ence (Jump) (27:23)
Hey, great to be here. Always a pleasure to hang out with you and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (27:28)
Absolutely. And to everyone listening, thanks for being here and until next time, good luck out there, and remember to tip your server, not the IRS.