President's Message - July 2026

The Wild West of AI

by - Thomas Twombly

artist - Daisy Lopez

As I left my neighborhood to drive to work a few weeks ago, the first half mile or so I found myself following behind a WAYMO – a nice white Jaguar sedan with no human driver, but with all kinds of high-tech sensors sticking out of it in very conspicuous ways.

My experience that morning was not unusual. I live in central Austin, just north of the UT campus, and WAYMOs have crawled all over my neighborhood day and night for what seems like a very long time, often with no riders inside either. Nonetheless, with all those sensors and cameras protruding from the front, back, sides, corners and top of each vehicle, you know they’ve been relentlessly gathering data on driving conditions, specific streets, corners, intersections, traffic signs, traffic patterns, pedestrian traffic patterns, and who knows what else… They’re constantly uploading that information to the massive, interconnected database that has informed, and will continue to inform, this remarkable artificial intelligence that is disrupting and transforming our world.

I have ridden in a WAYMO a few times, too. My first experience was completely accidental. I had ordered an Uber, and I must not have noticed that I was accepting a driverless car. But I was running late for a wedding, so I got in despite my initial hesitation. It was a disconcerting feeling to climb in and hear a disembodied voice greet me by name and ask me to fasten my seatbelt. It was more disconcerting still to sit in the back and see the steering wheel magically turning left and right as “we” – my invisible driver and I - drove to the venue. At one point, the car didn’t take the obvious turn I had anticipated along familiar streets around west campus, and I felt worried that something had gone badly wrong when it unexpectedly turned down an alley. But soon it became clear that there had been an accident resulting in a traffic jam along the normal route, and the WAYMO had received and responded to real time traffic data that I was completely unaware of, saving me precious minutes by adjusting its course. That was an eye-opening experience.

On this specific morning, however, a road crew had set up temporary signs and orange cones at the five-way stop sign where San Jacinto, 30th St., University Ave. and Speedway intersect – which is already a more complex intersection than most. And the WAYMO ahead of me was acting strangely. It obviously did not have the “experience” or the “judgement” or the “wisdom” to navigate this new and unusual situation. First, it froze, blocking those of us behind it. Then it hesitatingly changed lanes into the “right turn” lane directing it northward on Speedway. But then it suddenly veered left, heading west onto 30th Street, and froze again in the middle of the intersection as it almost collided with another driver heading west on 30th Street who had chosen the correct lane from which to turn left. Fortunately, no one was hurt and nothing was damaged, but it was a tense and frustrating situation for all the human drivers involved. That too was an eye-opening experience.

Every day my email is filled with solicitations touting the capabilities of “customized” AI programs promising to help us become more efficient, more responsive to the undiscovered needs of our clients; better able to gain insight into the destructive inefficiencies hidden inside their investment portfolios, or to spot and quickly defuse the disguised time bombs lurking inside their individual financial plans.

Many more solicitations focus on marketing and communications, and they aim to help us develop and maintain hundreds or even thousands of additional client relationships in much less time and with much less effort than ever before. “Build trust at scale” was a recent subject line. That provoked a wry laugh and a head shake.

I have no doubt that this technology is transformative. I am quite certain that it is already being used very effectively in large, tightly-run, financial institutions to sort through reams of financial data in a matter of seconds to accomplish what used to take days or even weeks for CIOs, analysts, portfolio managers, and their administrative staff to do. Downstream, we and our clients are already benefiting significantly from those advancements – in many different ways - and I’m sure we will continue to do so.

That said, adoption of AI among the broader populace of financial advisors is quickly outpacing the ability of regulators and users to oversee it. Significant questions exist as to who will be held responsible and how problems will be fixed when AI makes a mistake or is provided with confidential and sensitive personal data without adequate firewalls, or if and when it “hallucinates” when people’s financial lives are at stake. As one recent article I read in a financial industry publication said: “we are sort of in the Wild West right now because the process is so new and the regulators have not caught up.”

Lucien, Stirling & Gray operates in a highly regulated profession. We take our fiduciary responsibilities to you, and to all our clients, very seriously. So, we will continue to remain curious and open to exploring the ways in which we can utilize AI responsibly, without exposing sensitive client data to unsecure environments, and without conceding our responsibility for continuously exercising sound judgement. That may well mean we move more slowly and more deliberately than others in our business. But reading the “Wild West” analogy above quickly reminded me of another provocative quote: “You can always spot the pioneers… they’re the ones face down in the dirt with arrows in their back.”

Thank you, as always, for your confidence and trust. Please call if you’d like to talk.

Thomas G. Twombly

President