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The AI Edge

Helping advisors scale from 1 person to many people.

AI Application:

ChatGPT Codex and ChatCut 

Overview

ChatCut is an AI video editing tool. You can upload long videos and leverage chat functionality to help you edit them. I decided to use the tool, but via a different medium.

In my pursuit to look at some deeper functionality with the frontier models, I decided to try out ChatGPT Codex and see if they could operate the process for me in ChatCut.

Codex is the coding side of ChatGPT, built into the desktop app. It writes code, but the part that matters for the rest of us is different: it can install a plugin, connect an account, and then go use that service on your behalf while you do something else. I gave it one instruction, read chatcut.io/chatgpt and install the ChatCut plugin, and it handled the install, the sign-in, and the account link.

Then I handed it a 22 minute video and a set of specs. It went into ChatCut, worked through the transcript, picked the five strongest sections, and built the clips.

How to apply ChatGPT Codex + ChatCut to the business today:

• Start with something you already say out loud. Record 15 to 20 minutes talking to your camera about a topic you explain to clients constantly. Roth conversions, sequence of returns risk, why you rebalanced. Feed it in, ask for three to five clips.

• Write the prompt like a brief, not a wish. I specified five clips, one to three minutes each, and an end card that says thank you for watching. Specificity is what separates a usable output from a pile of fragments.

• Mine the recordings you already have. That webinar from March, the lunch and learn, the quarterly market update. Most firms are sitting on hours of footage that got watched once.

• Kick it off and walk away. This ran for a long stretch. I got two other things off my list while it worked. That's the point.

Advanced

• Build the hub and spoke properly. One recording becomes the newsletter, the LinkedIn clips, the website FAQ videos, and the onboarding library. The recording is the asset. Everything else is a cut of it.

• Create a question library. Log the questions prospects actually ask. Once a month, sit down and answer eight of them on camera. Cut them into a clip bank the whole team can send.

• Run parallel agents off one source. The same transcript that produces clips can produce a written piece in another thread. Same raw material, two outputs, neither one requiring you to be present.

• Use it for internal work, not just marketing. Have a newer advisor record how they'd explain a concept. Cut it into segments and review them together. It's a coaching artifact that didn't require anyone to sit through 22 minutes.

What could this application mean for the future of our business?

For a long time the answer to "why aren't you producing more content" was honest and unglamorous: editing is tedious and nobody in a five person firm has time for it. That constraint is quietly going away, and I don't think we've priced in what that does to the competitive picture.

When a solo advisor can talk for 20 minutes and end up with a month of clips, the volume advantage a large firm's marketing department used to have gets a lot smaller. What's left is whether you have something worth saying. That's a better contest for most of us.

The client-side effect is subtler. People are getting used to seeing their advisor explain things in 90 seconds, on their phone, before the meeting rather than during it. Once a few advisors in your market are doing that, the review meeting where you spend 20 minutes on education starts to feel like a poor use of everyone's hour.

The other piece worth sitting with: I only worked on this for about 10 minutes. The rest of the time an agent was working and I wasn't. We're going to have to get comfortable with delegating to something that isn't a person.

See ChatGPT Codex + ChatCut in action:

Fair warning, my audio dies about six minutes in and stays dead for a while. I left it in and narrated over the top, because the part you can't hear is important to see how I instruct the agent.

This is the longest video we've produced for a demo. It's also the one I did the least work on. You'll watch Codex install a plugin from a single sentence of instruction, sign into a service, read a 22 minute transcript, report back that it found five strong arcs at roughly two minutes each, and then tighten them to 1:57, 1:54, and 1:44 seconds while I go do something else entirely.

You'll also see where it fell short, including the export it couldn't hand back and the first clip that came out with no captions. But overall, the work it did would have taken me longer and also not allowed me to do other work. I was impressed, despite still be a little rough around the edges.

-Matt

I'm teaming up with Revenue Grid for a webinar on August 26th on AI, trust, and what clients aren't telling their advisors—some of it might surprise you. Sign up here!