AI Academy | AI for Financial Services

AI for Financial Services Course Series

The financial services industry, long built on the "expertise-as-scarcity" model where value is tied to advisor man-hours, is facing a fundamental breaking point. The convergence of margin pressure, the $84 trillion "Great Wealth Transfer," and AI acceleration is forcing a shift from manual production to "AI-scaled intelligence." This four-course certificate series is a strategic and tactical guide for advisors and firm leaders to navigate this disruption, decouple labor from value, and orchestrate intelligence at scale.

Purchase Options

4 Course Series Duration 4 hours
Released Feb 2026

Course Level Beginner to Intermediate

Certification Professional certificate awarded after exam

Format On-demand videos to learn at your own pace

About This Series

This professional certificate series provides a complete journey from strategic understanding to tactical execution. The series begins by diagnosing the "administrative tax" and "scalability ceiling" that have historically limited advisors, leaving trillions in mass affluent assets underserved.

It then equips you with the core mental models needed to rethink your strategy, focusing on the shift from "production (human-doing)" to "orchestration (human-directing)" and moving from effort-based accuracy to systems-based outcomes. The series culminates in a hands-on capstone where you will apply frameworks for technology selection, enabling you to turn strategy into action across your organization.

You'll Learn To

Identify the core components of the traditional financial services model and the historical role of humans in creating value.
Describe the key forces driving rapid AI-driven change in financial services, including accelerating capabilities, adoption data, and bellwether examples.
Analyze how the emerging AI-native paradigm differs from the traditional financial services model in terms of workflows, value creation, and economics.
Evaluate how AI-driven changes create risks and opportunities for individuals, teams, and organizations within financial services.
Create a concise personal reflection that summarizes the industry’s AI-driven changes and outlines your top opportunities, threats, and commitment to becoming AI-forward.

Key Questions Addressed

This course answers critical questions facing today’s financial services professionals:

How is AI transforming advice and planning, client onboarding and servicing, credit decisioning and underwriting, fraud/AML, compliance, and customer engagement?
What parts of my role are most vulnerable to automation and most enhanced by AI augmentation?
What are the core economic and workflow shifts reshaping financial services (cost-to-serve, scalability, personalization, and speed of decisioning)?
How should I think about my own career leverage, value creation, and skill development in an AI-forward world?
Where do I begin if I want to keep pace with industry transformation—whether I’m in wealth management, banking, payments, or financial operations?

Who It's For

This certificate series is designed for:

Advisors, planners, relationship managers, and client-facing teams in wealth management, broker-dealers, and banks.
Operations, risk, and compliance professionals (e.g., onboarding, servicing, KYC/AML, fraud, credit, underwriting, QA/control functions).
Leaders and managers responsible for workflow performance, productivity, digital transformation, and operating model modernization.
Anyone who wants to understand the real impact of AI on financial services and on their role.

What You'll Do

Examine the traditional financial services model.
Analyze how AI enhances or replaces key tasks.
Explore adoption patterns that signal where the industry is heading.
Write a short AI-forward reflection outlining your top risks and opportunities.

Course Syllabus

Course 1: The State of AI for Financial Services
This course provides a foundational understanding of how AI is transforming financial services. You will examine the traditional human-centered model, explore the forces accelerating AI-driven change, and learn how the emerging AI-native landscape differs in its workflows, economics, and sources of value. You will leave this course with a clear understanding of the opportunities and threats AI presents, and a concise personal reflection on your place within this new landscape.

What You’ll Learn

This course will teach you how to:
- Identify the core components of the traditional financial services model and the historical role of humans in creating value.
- Describe the key forces driving rapid AI-driven change in financial services, including accelerating capabilities, adoption data, and bellwether examples.
- Analyze how the emerging AI-native paradigm differs from the traditional financial services model in terms of workflows, value creation, and economics.
- Evaluate how AI-driven changes create risks and opportunities for individuals, teams, and organizations within financial services.
- Create a concise personal reflection that summarizes the industry’s AI-driven changes and outlines your top opportunities, threats, and commitment to becoming AI-forward.
Course 2: The Future of Financial Services
This course examines the strategic shifts reshaping financial services: from static data to dynamic, continuous context; from sequential, manual workflows to domain-wide automation powered by agentic AI; and from input-based to outcome-based pricing. You will come away understanding these shifts, and how your company and career need to change in order to navigate them.

What You’ll Learn

This course will teach you how to:
- Define the purpose of an AI-forward strategic playbook and explain how it shifts the focus from understanding AI disruption to responding to it.
- Describe core strategic shifts in financial services by contrasting the old way of operating with the emerging AI-forward approaches, supported by relevant data and examples.
- Analyze the implications of each strategic shift for pricing, workflows, value delivery, competitive advantage, talent development, and organizational culture.
- Evaluate your organization’s current position on each strategic shift by rating yourself as lagging, adapting, or leading.
- Answer key strategic questions for any shift where you are lagging or adapting to determine your most important areas for AI-forward improvement.
Course 3: Finding Your AI Advantage: Use Cases in Financial Services
This course is a step-by-step walkthrough of how to identify use cases for AI and problems that can be solved in a smarter way using AI. You will use the Use Case Model to unbundle tasks using JobsGPT and CampaignsGPT, and the Problem-Based Model to articulate top strategic problems using ProblemsGPT. By the end, you will have built your foundational AI action blueprint: a prioritized list of quick-win pilot projects and strategic problem statements.

What You’ll Learn

This course will teach you how to:
- Describe how the Use Case Model functions as a bottom-up framework for identifying AI opportunities and why unbundling tasks reveals quick-win pilot projects.
- Apply the Use Case Model by using JobsGPT and CampaignsGPT to unbundle your own role or workflow and enter the outputs into the Piloting AI Use Case Workbook.
- Analyze and prioritize the use cases you generated by applying the workbook criteria for impact, effort, feasibility, and exposure.
- Describe how the Problem-Based Model functions as a top-down framework and explain how ProblemsGPT supports the creation of strong strategic problem statements.
- Create a preliminary AI action blueprint by completing both the Piloting AI Use Case Workbook and the Problem-Based Workbook to determine the highest-value starting points for implementation.
Course 4: Applied AI for Financial Services: How to Select and Use AI Technology
This course teaches you how to navigate the AI technology landscape and select tools that align with your workflows and use cases. You will learn the Three Tiers of AI Technology framework and analyze examples from across underwriting, claims, distribution, and operations. You will also get a behind-the-scenes look at core implementation skills such as high-context prompting, grounding AI in your documents, and building reusable custom agents.

What You’ll Learn

This course will teach you how to:
- Describe the core challenge of navigating the AI technology landscape and explain the purpose of the Three Tiers of AI Technology framework.
- Explain the role and value of each tier (Existing Tech, Frontier Models, and Third-Party Tools) as a practical system for prioritizing and selecting technologies, providing examples of each.
- Interpret key evaluation criteria using examples from a curated set of industry-specific AI tools to understand how to vet technology effectively.
- Explain the value of essential implementation skills like creating high-context prompts, conducting deep research, grounding an AI assistant in your own documents, and building a reusable custom agent.
- Apply the Three Tiers framework and your hands-on skills to complete a preliminary implementation plan by mapping tools to your prioritized use cases.
Final Exam

“This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. ”

Dshanya Reese
Strategic Insurance Marketer

"This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. "

Erin Carpenter
Sr. Digital Marketing Director

"This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. This is an amazing placeholder testimonial. "

Yadin Porter de León
Leading Global CXO

About the Instructor

Taylor Radey is the Director of Research at SmarterX, where she leads original research on how artificial intelligence is transforming work, business, and society. She also serves as an instructor supporting AI Academy by SmarterX and the AI Mastery Membership, translating research into learning experiences for professionals navigating rapid change.

Taylor spent over 15 years advising teams on digital strategy, growth, and change management. That experience continues to shape her approach today: grounded, practical, and focused on real-world application.

Related Courses

Intro to AI

Intro to AI

Our Intro to AI free class will help you understand what AI is and what it’s capable of doing. Professionals of all levels are encouraged to join. Data science and machine learning experience is not required!

Register Now

5 Steps Thumbnail2

5 Essential Steps to Scaling AI

Take the first step in your AI learning journey. Join us for a 60-minute free webinar to learn what AI is, and how it impacts businesses and knowledge workers.

Register Now