A one-off project at Armanino, a large accounting and business consulting firm that counts more than 60 billionaires as clients, has developed into a suite of bots and artificial intelligence services drawing even the most tech-savvy family offices.
Here’s how it all started. In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic began rapidly spreading across the U.S. and people were confined to their homes, Armanino partner John Stewart got a frantic call from a new client. A family office in California suddenly had no employees coming to work but a lot of reconciling to do across dozens of financial accounts.
“I am struggling to figure out what checks to cut, what ones not to cut, and I don’t know what to do if I can’t get people in here,” Stewart recalled a panicked family-office employee telling him.
The problem was a significant one that Stewart appreciated and wanted to solve. Family offices, depending on their investments and how they move their wealth around, might have 100 or more different accounts. In those cases, Stewart estimates that they might be dedicating as many as 20 hours every week making sure funds are in the right places, and painting a clear picture of finances for the family.
“I sat down that night and I said, ‘okay, what if I could build a bot that helps reconcile all these bank statements at family offices?” Stewart said. He was many years removed from his days as a software engineer, but Stewart went home that evening and started working on a low-code solution that didn’t require people to be on-site.
Armanino partnered with the family office to share the costs of speedily building the bot. A couple weeks later, it was running and reconciling everything. Then word began to spread among other tech-savvy family offices. One nicknamed the bot “Fabio” after the Italian-American actor and model known mononymously for his idyllic romance novel covers. Others wanted Fabio, too, and to know what else Stewart and Armanino could build for them.
Now, four years later, Armanino is offering a suite of family-office-focused tools to help with back-office and human resources tasks, as well as developing bespoke AI for family offices to help with things like investment due diligence, grant identification and application support, and advanced financial modeling. “It’s a lot of low hanging fruit; a lot of routine, redundant processes that are just really easy for automation to come in and take over,” Stewart said. Additionally, AI can offer them new insights and deliver more quickly than any person could.
Among others who have partnered with Armanino is the Ballmer Group, Steve and Connie Ballmer’s family office that manages their personal wealth, philanthropy, and businesses, including the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team. (Forbes estimates their net worth is $121 billion.)
“AI is an enormous opportunity,” Brandt Vaughan, chief investment officer of Ballmer Group, told Institutional Investor. “It’s an opportunity on a number of fronts. Of course, it’s an opportunity from an investment standpoint, it’s an opportunity from a back-office and line-of-business automation perspective. And ultimately we hope it’s a good opportunity for our consumer-facing businesses — the LA Clippers, the Kia Forum, Intuit Dome — to eventually leverage AI in those venues.”
Ballmer Group has more than 100 employees and, unsurprisingly, a greater percentage of them have a background in technology compared to other family offices. Steve Ballmer is the former CEO of Microsoft, which grew to almost $80 billion in revenue and became one of the most profitable companies in the U.S. under his tenure. Vaughan and others worked at Microsoft before joining Ballmer Group.
But while those employees have been fast to embrace AI tools, others have been skeptical. Sensational headlines about large language models and AI’s capabilities, and the potential to replace human workers, have misled and even spooked some of Ballmer Group’s staff, Vaughan explained. To overcome that, the family office has worked on establishing a foundation of AI knowledge across its organization and helps employees integrate it into their work.
“Everyone has sort of the same understanding of the tool set. We have tool sets we have to use. And then beyond that, we’re in the process of diving deep into some of our business processes to really use AI to enable those,” Vaughan said. Once employees better understood and gained comfort with the tools, they couldn’t deny the benefits. For example, some philanthropy employees were able to cut the time it took to send grantees a standard email from an hour to minutes.
Saving time writing emails might not feel exciting but saving 20 minutes here and there across 100 or more inboxes — not to mention all the other use cases — starts to make a big impact in aggregate.
Ballmer Group had been thinking about ways to leverage AI for a while but hadn’t begun implementing things at the family office in earnest until Vaughan had lunch with Stewart. The office was a longtime client of Armanino but wasn’t aware of the bot and AI work they were doing for others.
“I was like, wow, here’s someone who really deeply understands AI, how it can impact business processes, and how it could really impact our specific business processes,” Vaughan said.
“Family offices are a bit of a hard nut [to crack]. You can find lots of institutional solutions, or large business solutions, or you can find lots of small business solutions. But family offices sit in this strange sort of middle ground. And the work that Armanino was doing with AI just really sort of hit that sweet spot for us. And quite frankly, it’s been rare to actually talk to people who are leveraging AI….Armanino was the first group we had talked to who was really using AI in a novel way to solve some real business issues that resonated with us.”
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