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Rethinking CRM and AI Integration With Adrian Johnstone

Adrian Johnstone

Adrian Johnstone is the Co-founder and CEO of Practifi, a performance optimization platform that transforms data into insights, action, and excellence at scale. Practifi helps wealth management firms go beyond traditional CRMs and redefine what’s possible. With over 20 years of experience in wealth management, Adrian has an extensive background as a consultant and tech company founder, advising businesses on their technology, client experience, and regulation. He is also a renowned speaker at industry events in Australia and the United States.


Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:


  • [2:11] Adrian Johnstone discusses how Practifi helps advisors reduce friction in client relationships

  • [3:31] Why AI hasn’t changed Practifi’s core value proposition

  • [4:39] The danger of building AI products without clear client value

  • [7:44] Why Practifi started AI development with workflow automation

  • [13:53] Adrian explains how to evaluate whether AI tools actually deliver ROI

  • [15:15] Why firms feel pressure to have an AI story for stakeholders

  • [18:25] Preventing AI hallucinations with citations and secure infrastructure

  • [24:19] The anti-Salesforce Salesforce advocate perspective

  • [29:38] Managing a global fintech company across multiple continents

In this episode…


AI is everywhere, and financial advisory firms feel intense pressure to adopt it fast. From note-taking bots to automated client communications, the promise of efficiency is seductive. But when technology moves faster than strategy, how do firms ensure AI enhances client relationships instead of eroding trust?


Adrian Johnstone, a fintech executive and CRM innovator, explains that the key is starting with client outcomes, not shiny tools. He emphasizes listening closely to customers before building anything and focusing AI on high-impact areas like workflow automation and process standardization. Adrian advises firms to prioritize data integrity, use tight governance to prevent hallucinations, and require clear citations for AI-generated insights. He also encourages leaders to measure ROI rigorously, shut down tools that don’t deliver value, and resist layering AI over broken systems.


In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Adrian Johnstone, CEO of Practifi, about using AI responsibly in wealth management technology. Adrian discusses workflow automation, preventing AI hallucinations, and why fixing your data model matters more than chasing the latest AI trend.


Resources Mentioned in this episode



Quotable Moments:


  • “Our job is always and has always been to deliver awesome software, no matter what it's built in, so that it moves our clients forward in their relationships with their clients.”

  • “As soon as you try and scale that by depersonalizing it and whacking in an AI tool, it's like, are you making it better or are you just making it faster?”

  • “The value isn't in that. The value is in what you do with the output of that.”

  • “An AI layer sitting over a rubbish data model is just going to do rubbish.”

  • “If I won't stand behind what we're delivering, then we're not going to deliver it.”


Action Steps:


  1. Start with client outcomes before adopting AI tools: Focusing on the end client experience prevents you from chasing hype and building unnecessary features while ensuring technology investments directly improve relationships, retention, and revenue.

  2. Standardize workflows before layering on automation: Clean, consistent processes create a stable foundation for AI-driven efficiency because automating broken systems only accelerates mistakes and increases operational risk.

  3. Implement strong data governance and citation controls: Requiring traceable sources for AI-generated insights reduces hallucinations and compliance exposure while building trust internally and protecting client relationships externally.

  4. Evaluate AI tools regularly and eliminate low performers: Not every tool will deliver meaningful ROI, even if it sounds impressive, so turning off underperforming solutions keeps your tech stack lean and focused on value.

  5. Protect the human element in client communication: AI should enhance conversations rather than replace authentic relationships because preserving personalization strengthens trust and differentiates your firm in a crowded market.


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Episode Transcript:


Intro: 00:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

 

Richard Walker: 00:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Bill Cates, the referral coach and author of The Hidden Heist, and Chirag Gandhi of Mili. Today, I'm speaking with a prior guest, Adrian Johnstone, the CEO and founder of Practifi. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

 

Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right. To me, this is a special episode because I get to bring back a guest from very early in my podcast series.

 

 Adrian Johnstone is the founder and CEO. He is passionate about CRMs and Wealthtech and was recently fashioned as the anti-Salesforce Salesforce Advocate. Adrian, we're going to talk about that. Practifi has been around for 13 years, but in the US for nine years, with clients across five continents. They are both CRM and AI combined.

 

 And we're going to hear more about that. So Adrian, welcome to The Customer Wins.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 01:43 

Hey, it's welcome back. I'm. Yeah I'm back. It's an honor to be the first repeat guest.

 

Richard Walker: 01:50 

No, I'm excited to have you, man. I was excited to have you the first time. And this is going to be great today. For those who haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win. How they built and delivered a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company.

 

So, Adrian, let's talk about your business. Understand a little bit better. How does your company help people?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 02:11 

Yeah for sure. So obviously we're known most as a CRM provider. I kind of refer to that as us being the custodian of our clients' client relationships. And so we help them win by putting that in good order, making sure that, you know, it's rich. We have the richest data model across all industry CRMs, but also that we're taking friction out of the relationship.

 

And, you know, we'll talk a little more about Practifi Intelligence. But you know, we have the ubiquitous AI answer. But well before that, how do we take friction out of the day-to-day? How do we put advisors in informed conversations with their clients so they spend more time on helping their clients win? And by default, we all kind of went in the process.

 

Richard Walker: 03:02 

You know I.

 

Richard Walker: 03:03 

We're going to talk about AI. I mean as fast as I can get to it. Right. Because having you on the show from three years ago is to talk about that evolution that's taken place for you guys in the age of AI, because you came on the show in January of 23, when AI was just coming out to the world with ChatGPT and whatnot, right? But you just said something that I want to repeat the core fundamentals of your business.

 

Have they actually changed the core value you're delivering your customer? Has it actually changed?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 03:31 

Yeah, not at all. And it's interesting to me, you know, we're built on a Salesforce chassis and never do I sit here and talk to people about us being built in apex. You know, it's amazing. We have this coding language and all of a sudden everyone's like it, but AI and it's like you're talking about what it is, not what value it delivers. So our job is always and has always been to deliver awesome software no matter what it's built in, so that it moves our clients forward in their relationships with their clients.

 

Richard Walker: 04:05 

You know, I have to admit, when on January 23rd, I told my company, there's two things we're going to do this year. Every person on my team is going to adopt AI in some capacity. We're going to learn how to use it and make it part of our lives. But two, we're going to build our first AI product. And I had the fallacy of okay, AI is cool, what can I build with it?

 

And I kept thinking about it. I'm like, I don't want to build that. I don't want to build that. And then I listened to my customers and I heard what they actually wanted, and I saw an application for AI and I'm like, oh, that's where it starts to make sense. So that fundamental has to always play out.

 

 Are you seeing people missing the mark on that?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 04:39 

Oh man. So badly. It's you know, the LinkedIn is both really encouraging and really terrifying when, you know, you see either RIAs or, you know, overnight experts in AI are out saying like, oh, over a weekend I built this or I built that, and it's like. That's awesome. But what value does it deliver to the experience you want to deliver to your clients or to your business?

 

Is it moving the bottom line forward? Is it compliant? Have you thought about that? Do you even understand what that means? And I just see so many people out there who don't come from a software development background who are like, oh, because I can, I should.

 

 And it's like, yeah, because you can. Maybe you shouldn't. You know, you need to think it through properly first. And so there's maybe a little bit of a reckoning to come there for a few folks.

 

Richard Walker: 05:35 

You know what it's like when the first time somebody created music with AI, we were all blown away like, oh my gosh. And today if somebody wants to play their AI music they built, you're like, please don't. Please.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 05:48 

Yeah. Or you know, wow, man, I've, I've worked out how to get AI to answer emails for me. Whereas now it's like, oh, I can tell it was written by AI. I'm not even going to bother reading it.

 

Richard Walker: 05:58 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 05:59 

Yeah, that's a problem. It goes from an advantage to a disadvantage in a heartbeat. In an industry that's all about people. And I talk about this a lot. Our clients, you know, advisors and their teams, their currency, their differentiation is the experience and the relationship that they create with their clients, with the end investor.

 

And as soon as you try to scale that by depersonalizing it and whacking in an AI tool, it's like, are you making it better or are you just making it faster? And just as it's faster to move forward, it's faster for the client to go, well hang on. I'm now being served by a machine. I'm going to go to the other advisor who, you know, gets the spelling wrong every now and again, but really understands me as a person.

 

Richard Walker: 06:48 

I had a great episode with Katie DeFeo of SunWest Credit Union out of Arizona, and they were talking about how they rolled out their AI named Sonny, and the first time it went out, it was a total failure because now customers are like, I don't want to. I'm used to talking to people. I don't want to talk about this AI thing. Yeah. And then they stopped.

 

They withdrew. They said, oh my gosh, let's listen harder to our customers. Let's really, really understand what it is they want. And they rolled out Sonny in a much more successful way where people understand you can always get to the agent that you want to talk to. You don't have to talk to the AI and the AI can do things faster and get you answers faster.

 

 So it's partnering with you. But the other thing they did is they personalized it so it's more funny and it's more engaging. It's a fantastic view of how to do this. So let's go back to Practifi. You've had three years.

 

 That wasn't your homework assignment, but it was everybody's homework assignment. What have you done?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 07:44 

So look I think we started maybe in a different place to you. We started with the listing but we didn't attempt with what we are going to build out of the gate? We actually dialed it way back and said, we're going to watch, and we're going to listen, and we're going to see where value is, and we're going to talk to our clients at great length. And that culminated last year in us pushing really hard and putting Practifi Intelligence into the market. And contrary to what was going on, there was an explosion at the time.

 

As you know, we saw the note taker pool just like, you know, if it had been powering a fan, I would have been cool all year as every new note taker lobbied into the market. But we started in the back end. We talked to our firms and said, what unlocks value for you? And they said, it's workflow, it's process. We want to scale, but we know we need to standardize to be able to do that.

 

 And so Practifi's first feature was a natural language kind of workflow creation. We get that. But complex workflows are building them as a skill. And so we started with what we call admin intelligence today and it was like, you can just ask it, build me a move money process and then it'll coach you on how to make that better. It's like, hey, like what you've asked for is kind of pretty simple.

 

 This is a better example with a wealth specific lens. Would you like to try again? And kind of walk you through this curation teaching you how to prompt giving you insight and then at the point you're happy with it, just commit and it'll go away and build it and rectify for you. So, you know, we worked out the back end is where the first most meaningful value was for our clients. That's not the same for every client.

 

 For our clients, that's where they were feeling the pain.

 

Richard Walker: 09:32 

You know, I think I fell for it. There's a lot of temptation to build a new product, an absolutely new product because of AI. Right. But I think you've been very, very smart about this because there's a lot of fear of missing out, a lot of hype about, oh, you got to be doing it. I mean, how hard was it to resist not building a note taker yourself?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 09:51 

Well, we have one now.

 

Richard Walker: 09:53 

Oh, there you go.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 09:54 

We didn't build it first. And we again, we took a bit of a different approach to it. So we put out admin intelligence and we released relationship intelligence. And that's all about how you get ready to, you know, pull in all of the information, whether it's from CRM or from email or from the web more broadly, to power a great conversation and really feed a great relationship. And we've really delivered a huge amount there.

 

And then we linked it back to admin intelligence. How can the outworking of that, the insights from that actually trigger all of your custom workflows and tasks? So, so many of the note takers can write a task to the Salesforce platform. It's like, great, now there's something for someone to go and do. But as a business, you've just invested all this effort making them really personalize and custom to you.

 

 And they use third party tools like context. So we join those dots. And then it just felt obvious to then say, well, I know it's commoditized, but let's do the transcription and summarization service at the front. So we call that meeting intelligence. And it's pretty lightweight.

 

 And you can easily spend a couple of hundred bucks on, on a note taking tool these days in warehouses like 20. It's, like guys, the value isn't in that. The value is in what you do with the output of that. And so yeah, we really went down the path of saying, where does the value live? And the center of an advisor's universe isn't a meeting, it's a relationship.

 

 And so we put the real meaning in the relationship. And the meeting part is it's an efficiency gain, but it's a pretty commoditized efficiency.

 

Richard Walker: 11:37 

You know, I have evolved with AI because I went from, let's build a product and bring it to market, which we did, to how can we provide more value in our product? How can we create more features from the backlog? How can we streamline and how can we be even more stable as a product set in terms of our infrastructure? So a lot of our focus with AI is not on the front end experience. It's on the back end of metadata structure, coding practices, doing things faster.

 

Honestly, I don't know how you feel about this, but I have a goal that within the next year, we can have a conversation with a customer who tells us a problem that they want to solve, and within a week it's in production.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 12:16 

Yeah.

 

Richard Walker: 12:17 

I would love to be able to do that. I think it's possible. It's hard.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 12:22 

Yeah, it's I mean, we were similar to ourselves, you know, we didn't launch a product immediately, but you know, our our teams, our engineering team in particular learned, you know, went really hard into using Claude and Cursor and now Claude and and Claude code. And we just have seen massive, massive benefits. It's been really phenomenal as a software development business. You know what? What is possible in a sprint or in a release cycle is so much more and you can be so much more adventurous.

 

Which has been phenomenal. You know, we have AI tools deployed in every team in business. And it's you know, the onus is on us and it's an exercise we do as a leadership team. It's like, okay, so we've deployed all these tools. Are we getting value out of them?

 

 And there's plenty we've killed along the way. It's like, hey, yeah, this seemed like a great idea. Kind of didn't live up to the hype. And so it's important to turn them off as well.

 

Richard Walker: 13:24 

Yeah. I met a guy recently. I met a guy recently who is using genetic coding practices to build solutions. He's like, yeah, I've built over 70 apps, 20 of which have gone to production. Wow.

 

That's a lot of apps that don't make it. Yeah. What is it? Is it the kitchen? Playground?

 

 Is it real stuff? Was it? Oh, just because it was cool. Where's the focus? Like where?

 

 Where's the value you're delivering to your customer? And how do you know you're delivering that value?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 13:53 

Yeah that's right. And I think, you know, I think for advisors today and there's so much hype. It's like getting on the AI bandwagon. You can build this yourself. I mean, oh yeah, you're in the same groups I'm in on LinkedIn.

 

And there are some really strong advocates for just building it yourself. It's like I mean, yes, you can, but should you? And do you really want to sit in front of the SEC and say, yeah, it's great. I built this over a weekend and we've been relying on it now to communicate information to our clients. I'm in the no camp there.

 

 I'd be leaving that one to the professionals.

 

Richard Walker: 14:29 

So yeah, I mean, honestly, one of the reasons I'm resistant to put AI in the front end of my product is simply because the agreements I'm seeing with big customers now all ask, what are you doing with AI? How are you protecting us, etc. I don't want my end user using AI quickly from the front end perspective. Go to ChatGPT for that, go to other products. That may change in the future if I see a real, real use case for it. But like you said, the back end is where you're building the value of your product and the product is what the customer cares about.

 

So here's my other question. Do your customers actually care that your solutions were built with AI driven by AI? Infuse AI or anything AI? Do they care?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 15:15 

Look, I think at the moment the answer to that is yes, more than they should. You know, I think there is definitely a FOMO component to it. It's, you know, what are we getting from an AI perspective? Because they, you know, deal with large firms typically across the world. And, you know, so many of them are managing, you know, multiple billions, tens of billions of dollars in client assets.

 

And they have investors and stakeholders in the business who are looking for them to be contemporary. And so they're looking for what's their AI story. And in turn, they're looking not just at us, but everyone in their tech stack to say, well, what's what's the AI story? I'm going to tell my investors that we're getting it from our suppliers. So I think that will normalize over time.

 

 And people, the question will return to what value am I delivering to my clients? And how we got there will be less about what the tech was built in and more about whether it's adding value. So I think right now there's, you know, there's a budget for AI technology that is separate and discrete to good tech in general. And, you know, I think that'll normalize over time.

 

Richard Walker: 16:35 

Yeah, I agree with that because everybody was jumping in saying we've got to do something. In fact, I was laughing while walking through an airport a year and a half ago when the caterpillar was now AI driven. The tractor company and non tech companies are touting AI. I'm like okay it's over. The mainstream has it.

 

It's over.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 16:56 

It's funny. It's you know, as someone who cares incredibly deeply about the value delivered, you know, there's plenty of things that people are excited about. I have an agent that does this. It's like you also had a rules engine that could do that for you for the last ten years.

 

Richard Walker: 17:14 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 17:14 

Didn't set up the rules. So it didn't do it for you. But you know the AI you've got excited and you've learned how to prompt. And so now you've got it doing it for you. And so I think there is that, you know, we talk sometimes about the fact that people see failings in technology.

 

But often it's just the failing is in their ability to maximize the value they get out of what they have. And sometimes it's, you know, it can be a little that, that dichotomy, the next shiny thing comes along that draws the attention. Look at what we solved with this. As you could have solved that years ago.

 

Richard Walker: 17:50 

Yeah, I.

 

Richard Walker: 17:51 

You and I have been around long enough to see it. I mean.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 17:54 

I've got the head of.

 

Richard Walker: 17:55 

Blockchain. Yeah, all the different types that have come out, but I mean, AI look, for me, this is the first technology that feels like I'm co-working with somebody where it's not just a tool that runs a specific process every single time. And that's actually a problem too, right? If I'm talking to a human, they make mistakes. They do things different than you expect.

 

How are you guys managing? You know, the quality of how the AI works in your product.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 18:25 

Yeah for sure. And look, it is a challenge. You know, the reality is that humans in the team can make mistakes and so can technology. And, AI is more prone to that than others. We're really narrow in the use cases and we go incredibly deep into citation so we won't put information for.

 

For example, our meeting preparation capability pulls information from the CRM data, email data, you know, call transcripts and the web as is relevant to it. Every single thing that is put forward has an attached citation. So before the human in the loop is able to say, yep, I'm comfortable that this is right, they can click on it and they can go back to the email and they can say, yep, that context fits. That makes clear sense. I can attribute that.

 

 And so we don't want there to be a risk that we're providing information or, or suggestion that hallucinates. Just as you know, we infrastructure really every one of our clients has their own dedicated lockdown Azure environment for the AI to operate in its own rag store. Nothing is shared publicly. No training or learning 20 models. Everything is, you know, in these kinds of water tight bubbles.

 

 And that's because we would rather be overly cautious. You know, we understand the consequences of what happens if this goes wrong for our clients. I'm not sure every vendor out there is as tight. You know, I think there are plenty where it's okay if it's a bit gray.

 

Richard Walker: 20:10 

Yeah. It is a hard thing. I mean, I've experienced this. I'm sure you have too. If you ever give the same prompt twice to an AI and you get two totally different results.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 20:22 

Yeah. What is going on? Yeah. Well, I guess it's because it's, you know, it's interpreting. And so, you know, it's an interesting example. We had our whole North American team together last week for our summit. We do it twice a year. Awesome fun.

 

So great in a remote working environment to see faces and check out.

 

Richard Walker: 20:41 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 20:43 

And as part of that, you know, we like to keep it a bit fun and so but with a strong work message. And so I used Claude to put together an activity. It was like an hour long activity. And I iterated with Claude over this activity. And as I dug in and, you know, I'd ask and we'd try and clarify and kind of work backwards and forwards.

 

It's ridiculous. You finish up talking to this thing like it's a person. But then I got to the point where I realized it just diverged completely and went into, you know, and I had to go back through it and I was like, oh, back here. It just stopped referencing what had gone before and started over.

 

Richard Walker: 21:24 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 21:24 

And I'm like, this is like, imagine that in a, in a meaningful client interaction. Like you just can't take that risk. And so for a product perspective, we have that really locked in.

 

Richard Walker: 21:36 

Yeah I think of AI as being this really, really intelligent blank slate. Every time you open it up. It doesn't know anything anymore. It knows all of its knowledge, but it doesn't know the context of what you're doing. Yeah, unless you feed it that context.

 

And probably what you're describing about it moved off the chain and went somewhere else. That's probably when it ran out of memory and started dropping things out of memory just to manage itself. Right?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 22:02 

Yeah. And so I like using projects. And you can keep referencing artifacts and all that kind of stuff, but it's still like the onus is on you as the person working with it to keep it focused. Nope. Don't go that way. Go this way.

 

Richard Walker: 22:15 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 22:15 

And I think there's so much of this I built this app over a weekend and that's not really being thought through. It's like, yeah, look, I ran ten tests and I was pretty happy with them. Yeah. Kind of. It was a bit off the mark, but I know.

 

So it's okay. And I'm like, okay, but what's what about the 11th one about the 112th one. You know, what does that look like? And I'm just not sure that that's being thought through. And the answer, you know, that comes up in retort is, oh yeah, but people get it wrong as well.

 

 So okay, but there's.

 

Richard Walker: 22:49 

Accountability.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 22:50 

In the person and there's, there's an emotional attachment and a desire to get it right. Whereas within the AI there's a desire to give you an answer.

 

Richard Walker: 23:00 

Yeah. There you are.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 23:02 

Concern about whether it's right.

 

Richard Walker: 23:04 

Yeah. It was actually hearing so many people build an app over a week. And that drove me last summer to say, I've got to figure out a genetic coding and understand what's going on. And I learned very, very fast that it goes off the rails. And. It can produce something. But is it scalable? Is it sellable? Is it secure? Is it ready for prime time?

 

And you know, you brought products to market building the products, not the hard part. Getting it ready for production and getting it scalable and supportable. And I mean just documentation for the product for your users that there's so much that goes into it.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 23:40 

And then wanting to stand there and look the client in the eye and say, yeah, I feel good about this.

 

Richard Walker: 23:46 

Yeah. You know. Yeah. Right.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 23:48 

Yeah. We've done this and, you know, you're entering into a commercial, you know, contractual relationship. But there's also a human trust relationship here. And I refuse to sit in those conversations. If I won't stand behind what we're delivering, then we're not going to deliver it.

 

And so, you know, the barometer is going to be me as an individual being willing and happy to stand there. And you know, that sometimes is hard.

 

Richard Walker: 24:16 

So how did you get this moniker of being the anti-Salesforce?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 24:19 

Salesforce advocate Salesforce is Salesforce. Sometimes everyone's whipping boy in a web built on it as a chassis. And sometimes it's a little tricky where people are like, oh, you're, you know, you're everything about Salesforce and you won't listen to anything else. And. it has been an interesting journey there.

 

We don't use Salesforce as AI capabilities, we don't use Agent Force. And of course we're not built sitting on top of Financial Services Cloud. We use Salesforce as a platform, as a service, and we use the best available of everything to deliver outcomes for our clients. And Salesforce's agent force is not the best available from an AI perspective. And so we just don't use it.

 

 And if you read my stuff on LinkedIn recently, you'll also see me talking about financial services Cloud. And you know, people are in this rush to leverage AI. And they've got these custom build out CRM environments that are just terrible because they're like shantytowns. It's where we started with a data model that wasn't right for the industry. And then we got consultant group number one to get us live, and then they didn't want to come back and do more hours.

 

 So we got consultant group number two who had one of the people from consultant group number one to extend it some more and then extend it some more. And like if it were a physical building, you wouldn't walk into it. But they entrust all of their client relationships to it. Yeah. And then of course, the answer is, well, it's hard and expensive now.

 

 So we're going to throw an AI tool over the top like Agent Force and hope that makes it better. And I think, you know, Salesforce is awesome at what it does. But you've got to recognize what it does well. And it's an incredible technology platform.

 

Richard Walker: 26:13 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 26:13 

Not is a very good product if you're an RA. It's not built for that. They don't pretend that it is. Consultants will sell you that it is. But really it's a starting position.

 

And everything after that is custom and scrappy. And AI isn't going to fix it. You know, an AI layer sitting over a rubbish data model is just going to rubbish. And, you know, as we talked about before, from an agentic perspective, automating bad design doesn't make it better. It's just that you don't have to.

 

 You can kind of look away, pretend what's happening behind the curtain has made it, made it pretty. And so for me, I think the anti Salesforce Salesforce advocate is I'm all for the platform you know and they'll get the agentic AI stuff in a good spot in time. Yeah. You know I think Salesforce is fantastic in that way. They'll persist and they'll invest and they'll get there.

 

 I think for advisors and in firms of any size really, whether they're, you know, the aspiring kind of couple or person shop who, who wants to move to a scalable platform but doesn't really know what they're doing or whether they're big, mature tens of billions in AUM who have kind of built these things over time. They just need to step back and realize that AI isn't a fix for what is there. And so, you know, sometimes it comes across as being negative. But I think the answer is I'm just realistic. It's, you know, understanding.

 

Richard Walker: 27:47 

That's what it seems like to me. You're looking at it for how it is, how is it helping you do what you need? How does it help your customer do what they need and the right tool for the right problem? I gotta tell you though, when you said shantytown and people in America don't see shanty towns unless they travel internationally. I mean, realistically, and I've been to South Africa several times.

 

My wife is from there. And the moment you said shantytown, the first thing I thought about was Salesforce. And you build on Salesforce, build on Salesforce. I have seen a two story shanty house, the corrugated metal, who would go in the second level of that thing? I don't know, that seems entirely Delta.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 28:23 

You know, I think it's and I think it's a nice analogy to technology because it's born out of necessity at the time. It's born with forward thought about risk. Yeah. That corrugated roof with a tarpaulin stretched over the top of it. It's going to keep me dry.

 

It's probably not going to keep me safe in the slightly stiff wind. I might die and so might be the people who are sleeping underneath me. Right? Right. It's.

 

 But. But at the moment, it feels like the right thing to do. And I think there's too much of that happening. And I think AI is a risk of accelerating that problem. Again, engineers with all of the best knowledge and power can build incredible buildings and do those sorts of things, and they can build them to price points.

 

 They don't all have to be the ultra expensive ones, but if you're just throwing stuff together, someone eventually gets it.

 

Richard Walker: 29:21 

Yeah. Yeah. Adrian, there's always been a question I wanted to talk to you about personally, and I'm going to bring it up now. You guys are not a huge company. You're not a fortune 500 company, right?

 

You're on five continents. So how do you manage an international company? How do you do it?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 29:38 

I spend a lot of time in airplanes. So you know what we were talking about. You know, Salesforce is incredible for the right things. And of course, we don't have to stand up geographic infrastructure. We get to use that Salesforce relationship for that.

 

And we get a lot of rights.

 

Richard Walker: 29:56 

So you're not worried about domain and privacy because you can build it in Australia. You can build it in Africa. Whatever.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 30:01 

Correct. You know we get to leverage the behemoth, but we get to bring it to market in the way that it was intended for the audience. And so we avoid a lot of that cost and complexity and risk, frankly, that comes with that. And then we work hard on time zones. You know, we only have team members in North America and Australia.

 

And so we're we're we're managing across time zones and we're working with clients. We're always very transparent in the way that we do that. So not without its complexities for sure. And definitely the bulk of our client book these days is here in North America between the US and Canada. But we, you know, we love having clients who give us input from other markets because it brings a richness to how we think about the product.

 

 You know, the way the team in London views a client relationship or in New Zealand views a client relationship is different to the way that, you know, maybe an Australian or a, you know, a team sitting in Florida might. So it's fantastic.

 

Richard Walker: 31:11 

I have to imagine it gives you somewhat of a competitive advantage as well, because you're not entirely dependent on being the dominant player in any one space or area. You can go where the customers need you and have the right fit for what you do.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 31:25 

Yeah. And look, you know, global market economics impacts different countries in different ways at different times. And so there's certainly a nice offset that comes from that. But the counter to that is you've got to make sure that you're keeping your product evolving in a way that is relevant to everyone. And one of the beautiful things about financial advisory relationships, when you strip back, you know, why do most advisors get into the industry?

 

And it's because they want to help people have a great outcome. And that is true in every market that we operate in. You know, that's the motivation. And what sits underneath that is, you know, we want to help people accumulate wealth. We want to help them manage the risks associated with their wealth.

 

 We want to help them age and accumulate their wealth gracefully in a way that meets their lifestyle objectives. So from a data model perspective, we get to be nice and broad to cater to the nuances of that in different markets. But we also get to bring that common understanding that actually if you come from the investor up Can you think about the relationship and the outcome the advisor is trying to deliver first, and the technology kind of sorts itself out. You don't have to sit there and think, what data point do I need and what object do I need, and how do they connect and what form is going to be answered by this. And it's like, hang on, what problem are we solving?

 

 Let's start there. And you get very focused on that.

 

Richard Walker: 32:54 

No, that's great. Look, before I get to my last question, what's the best way for people to find and connect with you?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 33:00 

Yeah. Look, if they want to find us from a practical perspective, obviously the website is nice and easy. There's an easy contact us form, and you can fill that in if you want to get to me personally, it's LinkedIn by me on LinkedIn and shoot me a note. But either way it is great.

 

Richard Walker: 33:20 

But don't write the note with AI. I heard that.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 33:23 

If you write the note with AI, I probably.

 

Richard Walker: 33:24 

Won't.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 33:26 

You know, if it's full of em dashes, I feel bad you know em dashes were such a beautiful part of writing. Up until they became a fingerprint for AI. And now every time I see something. With em dashes in and I'm like, I don't know, this this chat. Was it Claude?

 

Gemini like, thrown at me.

 

Richard Walker: 33:46 

Now I'll share with you my prompt to remove the em dash. It's about 98% accurate. All right, so here's my last question. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

 

Adrian Johnstone: 34:02 

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm probably going to give you two people because there's different periods in leadership that I think make the biggest difference. So prior to Practifi and founding that, if we go back what feels like three eons ago, I ran a consulting business that I found that having been an independent contractor working for other consultants. And the biggest impact there is a guy called Gavin Pearce in Australia. He's actually a South African guy who was in Australia.

 

He was the CEO of an insurer who became my first client. And Gavin really taught me to back myself and to have an opinion on things not always popular doesn't always have to be right. But he's you know, he told me, if you're going to say something, say it and mean it. And that really had a strong influence on how I went into the consulting world. You know, it's like if I'm going to stand in front of someone and have an opinion, I should be prepared to stand behind it.

 

 I should have a lot of integrity in that.

 

Richard Walker: 35:03 

Yeah.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 35:04 

Back in the early 2000, in consulting, integrity probably wasn't a word that was thrown around a lot unless it was paired with scandal. And so there was a big point of difference there where as an individual who was forming a company, I could differentiate by just being deeply integrous. And I've carried that with me a lot. And then more recently, if I think back to taking over the CEO role here at Practifi, not that long after our first call back at the end of Q1 2023. The person who's most shaped my thinking is the CEO, and the way that that plays forward is actually one of our investors is not the way that it's often often reflected in, in the populist kind of commentary.

 

But Carter Griffin from updater, who has provided me a lot of insight into kind of it's what makes a good CEO. And I'd say I'm a work in progress on that front. Definitely wouldn't give myself full marks. But having an investor who you can talk to and be a bit vulnerable and exposed to and ask those questions has been incredibly impactful.

 

Richard Walker: 36:18 

Yeah, I can imagine. I haven't had that myself. And I still have the role and the title. Nobody wants it, so I think I'm doing okay.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 36:27 

They're not putting their hands up, so I'm going to keep doing it.

 

Richard Walker: 36:32 

Oh man, I love asking this question because I love answers like you just provided, Adrian. So thank you for that. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Adrian Johnstone, CEO of Practifi, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out their website at practifi.com, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easy.

 

I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Adrian, thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Adrian Johnstone: 37:00 

Again, thanks. Thanks, Rich, and maybe I'll get a third appearance in about three years time.

 

Richard Walker: 37:07 

Let's go, let's go.

 

Outro: 37:10 

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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