CFA-Level AI and the ‘Move 37’ Moment You Need to Understand

AI for Advisors newsletter

Researchers at NYU Stern School of Business recently did something that should make every advisor pay attention. They took 21 large language models—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—and gave them the highly demanding Level III CFA exam.

Not just the multiple-choice section. The essay portion. The part that tests judgment, ethics, synthesis, and written reasoning. The questions that separate memorization from mastery.

ChatGPT’s o4-mini scored 79%. Gemini hit 76%. The passing threshold? 63%.

These weren’t lucky guesses or keyword matching. The models structured arguments, defended conclusions, and demonstrated the analytical reasoning that defines our profession. They reasoned through complex scenarios the way a human analyst would, just faster.

So, what does it mean when AI can pass the test that took you years to master? To understand what’s really happening, we need to go back to a time when machines first showed us they could do more than calculate—they could imagine. There’s a story from 2016 that explains what’s happening right now.

Your ‘Move 37’ moment

In March of that year, a world champion named Lee Sedol sat down in Seoul to play Go against Google’s AlphaGo. Go is an ancient game, older than chess— and very complex. It’s said there are more possible board positions than atoms in the universe. For generations, it was considered the final frontier of human intellect, too fluid, too creative to be dominated by machines.

In that now-famous match, for 36 moves everything looked familiar. Classic openings, safe positions, human logic. Then AlphaGo played Move 37.

Commentators froze. One whispered, “That’s a mistake. No human would ever play there.” Lee Sedol stared at the board, then stood up and left the room to take a cigarette break.

But the AlphaGo move was genius. It set up an attack dozen of moves ahead and changed the course of the match. AlphaGo won and it did so by discovering something no human had ever taught it. Move 37 looked wrong, until it looked brilliant. That’s the scenario we’re in right now as financial advisors.

AI is revealing to us insights in data synthesis, predictive behavior, and client challenges we’ve never seen before. At first, those observations look odd. They don’t match our playbooks.

But the lesson of Move 37 is simple: What looks unusual today often becomes tomorrow’s standard operating procedure.

Every advisor is sitting in front of their own Move 37 moment. The question is whether you’ll walk away from the AI board or lean into this new paradigm of working with “co-intelligence,” as Wharton School innovation professor Ethan Mollick calls it.

The real cost of standing still

Let’s get practical. What happens to advisors who shrug off these AI insights thinking they can wait for things to “settle down”?

First, they lose time. Two hundred hours a year vanish on tasks AI can already handle—meeting summaries, research synthesis, client communication drafts, compliance documentation. That’s five weeks of work that AI now does better, faster, and more consistently than any human.

Second, they lose ground with clients. Your clients are already using AI. (ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users, and many are using it for their own personal and business needs. They’re asking ChatGPT about portfolio allocation, tax strategies, and estate planning before they ever call you. (Similar to what physicians have experienced with their patients coming to appointments armed with insights from “Dr. Google.”)

Soon, you may experience the same type of interactions, with clients arriving at meetings more informed and possibly more skeptical. If your answers sound less sophisticated than what they got from a chatbot, you’ll be faced with an emerging credibility problem.

Third, advisors who avoid AI may be burning out their teams for no good reason. The best talent doesn’t want to spend their days on repetitive data entry and document formatting. They want to solve problems, build relationships, and do work that matters. When you make them compete with machine-on-machine tasks, you risk losing them.

Standing still in an exponential world isn’t neutral. It’s falling behind.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your competitors aren’t standing still. Somewhere right now, an advisor with a “growth mindset” is building AI workflows that make them twice as productive. They’re not smarter than you. They’re just more willing to learn.

From resistance to partnership

So, what might AI fluency look like for advisors? In 2023, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel made a decision that most executives would consider reckless. He announced that all 6,000 employees at his biotech company would be equipped with four customized AI assistants—tailored specifically for their roles. Not optional. Required.

His goal: bring 15 new products to market in the next five years. To hit that target in a heavily regulated industry with the same headcount, he needed a fundamentally different operating model.

So, he built one. Every employee now has four AI partners: an Assistant, a Coach, an Expert, and a Creative Partner. The company tracks 20 AI interactions per person per day. It’s not an experiment anymore. It’s how Moderna works.

Think about that for a minute. A company operating in one of the most regulated industries in the world—where compliance failures can cost billions and where every decision faces FDA scrutiny—decided AI partnership wasn’t a risk. Standing still was the risk.

Financial advisors face the same challenge. You need to deliver more—deeper planning, faster response times, better client communication—with the same team, the same hours, and exponentially rising client expectations.

You can’t clone yourself. But you can build what Moderna built. Here’s what that structure might look like in your practice:

• Assistant AI handles the repetitive work: Meeting notes, CRM updates, follow-up emails, compliance checklists. It’s the person who never calls in sick and never forgets a detail.
• Coach AI sharpens your thinking: Before a client meeting, it reviews your notes, flags gaps in your strategy, and suggests questions you haven’t considered. It’s the second opinion that makes you better.
• Expert AI: Research on demand. New tax rule? Complex estate scenario? Emerging market question? It synthesizes information from dozens of sources in seconds and gives you a starting point that used to take hours.
• Creative AI writes and designs: Client newsletters, LinkedIn posts, presentation decks, educational content. It doesn’t replace your voice; it amplifies it at a high-quality level while saving you time.

This isn’t science fiction. This is what we can build with tools that already exist.

The shift isn’t from human to machine. It’s from advisor working alone to advisor and staffers leading an AI team that scales your thinking, your availability, and your impact.

Try finding your own breakthrough

So how do you know when you’ve reached your own Move 37? It may feel uncomfortable. Your instinct might say, “That can’t be right.” But when you lean into AI, you see new patterns for a smarter, faster, more creative way to serve clients. That discomfort is the signal. It means you’re crossing from imitation to innovation.

Before we go further, let’s make this concrete. Open ChatGPT or another AI chatbot right now and pick one of these scenarios, or try all three if you want to see how AI adapts to different situations:

Scenario 1: The “stuck” client. Prompt: “You’re a financial planning strategist. I have a 58-year-old couple with $2M in assets who say they want to retire at 62, but every time we run the numbers showing they can afford it, they find a reason to delay. Give me three questions I should ask in our next meeting that will uncover what’s really holding them back—not just their stated concerns.”

Scenario 2: The conflicted inheritor. Prompt: “You’re a financial planning strategist. I have a 45-year-old client who just inherited $800K. She says she wants to invest it for retirement, but she’s been sitting in cash for six months and won’t commit to a plan. Give me three questions I should ask that will uncover her real priorities—not just her stated goals.”

Scenario 3: The business owner. Prompt: “You’re a financial planning strategist. I have a 62-year-old business owner with $3M who says he wants to sell his company and retire, but he keeps finding reasons to wait ‘just one more year.’ Give me three questions I should ask that will reveal what’s really driving this hesitation—not just his stated timeline.”

Each takes 30 seconds. You’ll get back questions you haven’t thought to ask. That’s not automation, that’s AI augmentation. This is how you collaborate with co-intelligence.

Three confidence-building experiments

The best way to understand this new kind of intelligence isn’t by reading about it—it’s by working beside it. Try these simple exercises to see what collaboration with AI actually feels like:

1. Delegate one low-risk task. Have AI draft a meeting summary, recap, or agenda. Use it as a starting point, not a finished product.
2. Co-think through a challenge. Ask AI to “act as a peer advisor” and brainstorm three ways to handle a tough client question or marketing problem.
3. Save one good prompt. When you find a prompt that works, paste it into a note labeled “Prompt Library.” That single act moves you from casual use to repeatable success.

Your goal: Focus on collaboration and reuse, not automation.

AI just passed the test that took you years to master. It’s not asking to replace you. It’s waiting to partner with you to think faster, work smarter, and lead differently. This is your Move 37 moment. Don’t walk away from the board. Take the next step.

Ready to make the leap? Horsesmouth’s AI for Advisors Pro training programs provide the structured, advisor-specific approach that transforms occasional users into confident practitioners. Learn more at www.horsesmouth.com/aipro.