How Agentic AI Beats Traditional Chatbots for Personal Finance Management

ANNA: Welcome back to the Noyack Expert series, and on this episode, we’re going to be doing something a little bit different. Instead of talking about markets or tactics, we’re going deep on what we’re actually building here at NoyackAI agents that do money work. CJ Follini, our founder, who we have here today, has spent decades inside family offices, institutional investing. And now he’s turning that experience into agentic AI for both DIY investors and advisors. We’re also going to talk about why we opened up a community round on We Funder so listeners can invest alongside us. Thank you so much for being here today, CJ. I know you’ve been very busy lately.

CJ: It’s been a lot of building and delivering products. But I really appreciate you taking the time and turning the spotlight on ourselves internally as we start this community round. It gives us a great opportunity to tell everyone exactly what we’re doing in Agentic AI.

ANNA: OK, CJ. Let’s start this off super simple. Everybody’s heard of what AI is by now, but not everybody’s heard the phrase agentic AI. In plain English, what is agentic AI and how is it going to be different than the chatbots people are messing around with right now?

CJ: Most people’s experience with AI right now is either a smarter search box like Perplexity, or just a more glorified LLM chatbot like GPT or Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5. You type in the question, it gives you an answer either sourced from a closed universe like a large language model, or searching across open sources like Reddit and other datasets that the model has access to now. That’s incredibly useful and we love it. We use it all the time, but it’s still just information and you have to parse through that information and still do a lot of work with a critical mind, which we should, and evaluate the good from the bad, the promoted from the objective.

Agentic AI is completely different. It is the next step. Instead of just answering, it can actually do things for you, of course within guardrails, and you have to define what it does and what it doesn’t do, but there is a defined set of tools that lead it on its path and the guardrails.

The easiest way to think about it is this way. A chatbot is really like a smart explainer. An agent is more like a digital teammate. I hesitate to use the word guide, especially in financial services, because that is fraught with a lot of compliance issues and it is not an advisor. It is not advisory in the sense that guide is, but more like an associate, a teammate, a coworker that has a specific job description. Just like you, Anna, your role as co-publisher has, you know exactly what you’re doing, right? You’re not just putting out information, you’re doing things in accordance with that description. Agents act the same way. They can pull the data, run the numbers, also draft up a strategic plan and then tactically execute. That’s a big difference from a chatbot. And importantly, you stay in control. We’re not talking about some AI running wild. The agent does the heavy lifting but the person still approves what happens.

ANNA: I think that makes perfect sense. I know something that some of our listeners might be wondering just hearing that is why can’t they just go to ChatGPT, give it the financial information they have and ask it to spit out an answer. Why is an agentic service like what we’re building better than that?

CJ: When you apply the task-oriented element of AI to money to personal finance, it becomes really powerful because as we all know, when you DIY your own finances, your own wealth, there are so many variables and data streams and noise out there to parse through. And then you have to execute after you decide what is useless information and what is valuable information. For example, everyone says you should have an emergency fund. OK, that’s great. But exactly how do you do it? And how do you maintain that tactical execution of that emergency fund when life happens?

You can also say, here’s where your money is actually going. Here’s the order I tackle things. So it actually creates it, prioritizes the tactics, the tasks. It says OK, you can’t get them all done but here’s the top three you have to get done. And if we have to iterate the plan, it can do that incredibly fast as an agent, Plan A versus Plan B. That’s where the agentic piece comes in, moving from answers to action.

That’s our focus. We build agents that make people’s financial lives simpler and smarter while keeping you, the user, in the driver’s seat.

ANNA: That’s perfect and I think it really helps people, especially that emergency fund example you just gave, making a three to six month emergency fund. That seems simple on the surface, but when you calculate the fact that life happens, you have bills to pay, you can’t just put three months of expenses aside just like that. Having something to help guide you through what you can do in real time really helps make some of these tactics more possible for people.

CJ: Completely. Listen, I think we know my origin story as son of immigrants. I had to take over and I was a young person playing hockey at a competitive level. And then my father had a stroke and I had to put all that aside and jump into the family business when it was a really difficult time and figure it out. I had no guides, no mentors, no Internet. I definitely did not have agentic AI. I can only imagine how much faster and more productive and more successful we could have been. We did OK, I’m going to grant you that. But it took 30 years to get to where we are. Imagine the acceleration of my career if we had something like agentic AI when I was younger.

ANNA: It really is, especially when you think about all of the potential that all of these people out there could have. They just don’t have the time or the resources or the knowledge in order to do it. And that’s a good point. And time, I think is a big one, right?

CJ: In fact, everything we do is not just for money. Money is there to buy you time. Financial freedom, that overused cliché is about time. Freedom is the freedom to gain back your time, to do what you want to do, when you want to do it or do nothing. That’s the choice, right? So it’s choice in time.

Now, if you have a day job, if you have kids, if you have a life you want to lead and you’re not a financial services professor, you’re not a wealth management professional, then how do you figure this out? You don’t have 5, 10, 15 years like I did to figure it out. You have to take care of it now, for your family’s sake, for your entire future. That needs help.

And it all starts with financial literacy.

ANNA: This actually ties perfectly into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, and that’s the problem that we’re solving with these tools. Before we get into the products, what these tools actually are, in your eyes what is the problem for a millennial or a millennial-minded DIY investor who might be listening to this episode right now? What is broken about how people have been managing their wealth today?

CJ: I would start with what I just said, financial literacy. Look, we’re going into something called the Great Wealth Transfer where 90 trillion, that’s trillion with a T, not a billion, is going to transfer from the baby boomer generation or Gen X to millennial and maybe Gen Z, but mostly millennial, right? That’s an enormous amount of wealth and accumulation that has to be in velocity.

In this country, most developed countries in the world only has 13 states that mandate even one hour of financial literacy education. If they don’t have education and they have a massive amount of money and accumulated assets and small businesses to appraise and trusts and state issues, how are they going to do it?

So it’s not a lack of information. There’s tons of that. In fact, they have too much information. They’re getting advice from everywhere. They’re getting it from social media with financial influencers, podcasts like this one, friends, your rich uncle and even newsletters. Yes, we have one, Your Wealth Blueprint, that drops every Sunday morning. So you have all of this information and we’re contributing to it and most of it isn’t really speaking to the individual.

So what do they do? I consider the bigger issue is translation. How do you translate all this information into action? You don’t need tips. What you really need is, OK, given my income, my bills, my goals, my accounts, what should I do next? And after next, what should I do second and third? And of course how?

Then there’s all the fragmentation. People are juggling 5 or 6 different systems and bank accounts and logins. You have a budgeting app, you have a brokerage app or a robo advisor like Robinhood or Betterment, maybe you have a 401K portal like Equity Trust, maybe a student loan site, maybe credit cards. None of it even speaks to each other.

Just imagine all the logins and passwords you have to remember. There have been times, I hate to admit this, but there have been times where I’ve had to go in and check something, couldn’t find the password for it. And I was like, you know, this is a problem for tomorrow. But it’s just so easy to be like, I’ll do that later, I’ll find the password later. It would have been so nice if we just had that with my bank information, with my budgeting information, so I didn’t have to go hunt it down in my drawer.

Listen, you’re smart, you’re responsible. And as you just pointed out, you feel constantly behind, right? And forget during COVID when you couldn’t even get anyone to talk to on the phone. It was really overwhelming.

And then if let’s say you’re someone who is inheriting a lot of wealth and you don’t have education or you are just in the top 1% because of your career, well, how do you get the whole picture? Planning, taxes, portfolio strategy and even alternate investments which we love, which we specialize in at Noyack. You need a quarterback. And forgive me for using a tortured sports analogy, but you need someone who sees it all and that someone is actually a digital someone. And most people don’t have that.

And registered investment advisors, they have a lot of clients. It’s hard for them to keep you top of mind and all of the aspects I just mentioned.

So here’s our thesis. What’s missing for everyone is that modern digital quarterback. We call that our agentic layer, right? That can see the whole picture. Keep a living plan updated as life changes and then suggest the next best moves. And of course not a lot of high fees. That’s another efficiency that an AI agent provides. It is cost effective.

ANNA: That’s a really big one, especially when you’re talking about your finances and trying to be better about your money. In some cases it might not make sense to drop thousands and thousands of dollars on advisors, on extra tools, on all of these different things. Just having one thing is so much better money-wise.

CJ: You know, it’s about lowering those legacy fees. That’s the reason robo advisors even exist. Their entire pitch was, hey, you can get some of these services better elsewhere, but you can’t get these services cheaper anywhere else. And people respond to that, but the best and biggest of the robo advisors, Robinhood, Betterment, they don’t have it all. They don’t have your insurance outlook, they don’t have alt investments to offer you. They’re not addressing your tax situation. So they’re just a sliver of your holistic personal finance picture.

So that’s what we’re trying to solve right there.

ANNA: And show you the whole picture. That’s honestly probably the most important thing you can do for your finances is be able to sit there and understand what’s happening all at once, just at the touch of a button. That’s super important.

And I think now is a fantastic time to get into probably what will be my favorite part of this conversation for the day, and that’s the specifics. People hear agentic AI for wealth and it still feels really abstract. It’s like, oh, someone’s made a chatbot to help me. That sounds kind of great, I guess, but it’s not abstract. It is quite concrete. So what are the actual products that we have here? How about we walk through Noyack AI and Profit AI, what they are, who they’re for and what they do, just to give people a better idea of what this actually looks like.

CJ: That’s totally fair. And I get it, agentic AI is not something that everyone understands. It is not yet a common part of our knowledge base.

So when we say agentic AI for wealth or agentic AI for personal wealth management or agentic AI for your personal finance, we’re not talking about a chatbot. It’s not there just to regurgitate a language model. We’re talking about AI that can actually do things for you under your decision-making control. It pulls information together, it runs analysis, it drafts a plan, and then it literally sets up an outline of all the next steps. Whatever you want to do, whether it’s a better household budget, whether it’s a better path to savings including an emergency fund, whether it’s actually looking holistically at your entire portfolio.

So at Noyack, we built 2 products. And the first is Noyack dot AI. That’s its name. We obviously like the name Noyack a lot. We use it and it is our badge of honor. Noyack AI is the first one. And it’s built, it’s purpose built for millennials and Gen Z. It’s purpose built for these generations who want to DIY their personal finance and wealth management. They’re not handing it over to someone else, handing the keys to their life over to an IRA. These are people who are trying to build wealth, but they’re struggling, juggling apps and advice and complexity.

So you can look at Noyack AI as a personal money mentor. These agents are designed specifically to reduce friction and confusion for all of us, for real people, not for billionaires or finance professionals. That’s why we are finance professionals. So what we can simplify and deconstruct what is unnecessarily complex.

And I don’t want to underestimate the fact that it even just aggregates everything in one place. Noyack AI sees all of your accounts and your taxes. And that holistic view, that 30,000 foot view digitally is incredibly important. When I was trying to DIY before there was a lot of technology, I couldn’t remember all the things. I had to put it on a giant whiteboard. I literally had this massive whiteboard in our conference room with all my personal information on it. And I had to erase it every time we used it for the office because it had all my personal information on that crazy whiteboard, right?

So that’s why that 30,000 foot view of Noyack AI is incredibly important. It’s hard to convey, but that’s the real benefit. It is that quarterback again.

So our second product is Profit AI and this is done in partnership with a father and son team, a dear friend of mine who has also been a 40-year investment professional. Profit AI is a different doorway into the same vision. Profit AI is very advanced for the individual to DIY, but it’s also built for registered investment advisors, RIAs, private wealth firms and even the most sophisticated individual investors. So these are finance professionals managing real portfolios, but beyond that, it brings that institutional level of tools to the rest of us as well.

I love the fact that Profit AI can bridge the DTC and retail finance community, the retail investment community, as well as the institutional investment committee. Profit AI was created in the last two years with thousands of hours of work and concretizing institutional-grade portfolio analysis and management is the first time it’s ever been done. It really is a first.

We identified this huge gap in the market with Herman and Michael Lorette, the creators, and especially amongst the individuals who are managing their own or the smaller independent RIAs who have a few clients, there’s no way you can do that efficiently. Profit AI does it better and more holistically.

ANNA: So when we’re talking about institutional-grade portfolios or investment, I know we kind of get the sense that it’s far more complicated than your everyday scenario, but what actually does that mean in practice?

CJ: OK, so Profit AI is built as a multi-asset portfolio platform. I know that’s a lot of fancy words, but let’s break it down. So you have cash, you have fixed income, bonds and the like, you have stocks, of course, any of the usual from Apple all the way to the most arcane Chinese or emerging market stocks. You have limited partnerships. There’s so many. And then of course alternative investments, again, our specialty: real estate, private credit, venture capital, special situations if you’re a little bit on the more sophisticated side and getting involved with hedge funds.

So it takes in all of this custodial data and market data. You have the economic market data, you have the data specific to either a fund, a hedge fund or an alternative investment subclass and it builds, optimizes and monitors all of these portfolios across all of those asset classes. I forgot commodities, crypto, currencies, futures and options.

Imagine that. Even just to have all of that in one view, the same way that maybe JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley wealth management have access to or the institutional Bloomberg terminals. That’s amazing. In fact, we sort of call it a Bloomberg Terminal for the rest of us because access to the Bloomberg terminals costs tens of almost 100,000 a year.

So it aggregates all of our individual net worth across all of these asset classes, across all of the accounts. So you see the full picture. It’s the portfolio version of the Noyack AI quarterback.

Now the best part is that there’s this agentic layer that sits over the top of that. That was just the first half. The information is half of an agent. So just like individuals need the information, the data to make decisions, agent AI agents need the same data and information in order to recommend actions. They just do it with thousands and millions of gigabytes of computing power behind them. And they do it incredibly fast.

So they’re pulling reports, they’re running scenarios, Monte Carlo simulations, they’re rebalancing or they’re recommending. They’re not actually doing, they’re recommending unless you allow them to rebalance in an automated fashion.

And the best part about Profit AI is it has all of our 100 years of proprietary agentic AI and models to power things like portfolio creation and optimization. I didn’t even get into the tax-aware and the risk optimization, two things that I’ve always needed to be better at. I said that if I only could be half of the tax expert that the famous Malone is, I’d have double what I would have now because I gave so much of it away in taxes. I was pretty good. But I could have been better.

ANNA: As far as all of this goes, with all that Profit AI is able to do for someone, what’s the agentic part there? What makes it different than just another fully comprehensive analytics dashboard?

CJ: That’s a great question. We’re trying to parse through that difference between AI that everyone knows and is essential. Not chatbots, but the data sourcing and the language creation. We’re parsing through that and the difference is that it’s not just showing you charts. It’s actually doing work. It’s taking work off your plate and giving you more time.

Remember I said that I think if you reduce all of personal wealth management, whether someone’s doing it for you or you’re doing it yourself, it’s one goal: time, time saved, more time to do other things.

For example, if you have to analyze your portfolio or come up with how you rebalance that portfolio and then even do what-if scenarios, what if the tariffs double? What if the Ukrainian war goes off the rails? And all of these risks and all of these what-ifs are really hard, almost impossible, frankly, for the individual to take into consideration and simulate. And then to make decisions on what you should do with your portfolio based on these things? Impossible.

That’s the whole idea. Less time doing this stuff, more time deciding and going on to your life.

Also, because advisors operate in a regulated environment, Profit AI is designed with compliance-ready workflows.

ANNA: Yes, I’m sure everyone’s a little concerned. They say to me all the time, saying, CJ, are you really going to give up your finances and your portfolio to some digital algorithm or agent online? And I’m curious what your response is.

CJ: Well, if you know how ours, Profit AI is built and you know the documentation, the SOC 2 compliance and the regulatory compliance, then yes, not only am I doing that, but so would you.

ANNA: Who would be the ideal user for something like Profit AI, especially because it has a lot of these more complex scenarios and complex analysis models built into it?

CJ: That’s an interesting question we’re still trying to answer. But first of all, our members, the members of Noyack at we are noyack.com, they get access to this. So regardless of whether they’re an institutional-like or a very sophisticated investor or just someone who wants to plug in their cash, their stocks and a couple bonds, they should have access to these kinds of tools.

Now, who would get the most benefit out of it? Well, I’m thinking that Profit AI is going to have a B2B clientele. I believe that within the next four or five months, we’re going to focus specifically on those smaller registered investment advisory firms, somewhere in between like 500 million and 2 billion in assets under management, AUM. And there’s an enormous amount of these firms and 70% of them lack enterprise-level tooling and tax optimization as well.

They’re trying to manage complexity with spreadsheets, Anna. They’re stitching together all different kinds of software, still using Microsoft Office and trying to put all of the portfolios into spreadsheets. Crazy. And so we think that could be the game changer for the entire smaller RIA industry.

ANNA: With this business-to-business thought in mind, how does this become a business? Where’s the monetization approach?

CJ: OK, so first of all, our agentic AI is going to be within the Noyack platform, our platform, the web application, soon to be mobile, and anyone can join. By the way, you can be an individual trying to manage 100 thousand dollars or 10 thousand dollars or you can be a small advisor managing 700 million. You can join and get access to financial literacy, all the research we have, 60 private alternative investment fund reports. We do deep dive research and analysis on private market funds that no one has ever done. They look just like Morningstar does for public securities.

So you get access. You bring all of your accounts via Plaid, a best-in-class, SOC 2 compliant aggregator and connector and you also get Noyack as your wealth management quarterback. So you see your entire picture.

Then Profit AI is added like a tier. It’s a tiered subscription, so subscription revenue and enterprise licensing revenue for larger implementations of Profit AI and we also have white-label partnerships where other platforms can integrate our capabilities at scale.

That’s an important part too, the scale that this product could have in the long run.

ANNA: And I think it’s really cool to be a part of how it’s built and watch it grow from day one. Now for our listeners out there, they have not been involved in this long process of creating these products. So a lot was probably just thrown at you. And believe me, we will be going more into detail on everything in future installments of the series. This is only our first episode with CJ. But to wrap up what we just discussed because we had a lot there, the simplest version of all this is that Noyack AI is the consumer agent that can help individuals build a plan and Profit AI is more of an institutional-grade engine that helps professionals run portfolios with the same core idea underneath, but it’s also available for anyone who is subscribed to the Noyack platform. Is that correct?

CJ: Absolutely. There are 2 entry points, 1 thesis. Agentic AI becomes the layer between people and the people who advise them and their financial lives.

You know, we’ve had RIAs become concerned saying, oh, you’re trying to replace me. Actually, someone just said it to me last night and I said, no, we’re going to make your interactions with your clients better because now they’ll understand what the hell you’re talking about right there. This is going to be your Rosetta Stone of financial topics. We’re going to make you more productive, more effective, and also relate better to your clients, and they’re going to want to bring more to you.

ANNA: That’s an excellent point, and this actually reminds me of a conversation I had on a previous episode with Greece Temps Imani. He’s the head of digital over at Citibank and we were talking about that exact point, that all of these AI things, people are scared that oh no, it’s going to take away the jobs, it’s going to make it so it’s all chatbot integrated and all of this, but AI is there to help boost your productivity as a professional, your productivity as a person. You as a person are the center of it. And think of all that you can do now that you have this time freed up. Whether you’re just a person trying to map out their finances or an RIA, imagine the time you’d have when you have a tool like this in your pocket to help you manage everything. You see everything just with the snap of a finger.

Think of everything else you could be doing with your work. You know, this might be personal because I love rollerblading, but I say that AI, especially agentic AI, it’s not a crutch. It’s actually like putting rollerblades on your feet and flying down the boardwalk, right? You can walk or run without them, but you’re going to go a heck of a lot faster with them. And it’s you doing that because if you don’t pump those legs, those rollerblades are not going anywhere.

If you’d like to learn more about Noyack’s agentic AI work before we have the next episode out, we’re going to link to NoyackAI, ProfitAI and our We Funder community round in the notes for the show.

And as CJ said, startup investing is risky and illiquid. Only invest in what you can afford to lose.

Thank you.

CJ: Thank you, Anna, for setting this up and giving me an opportunity to explain more about both agentic AI generally and what we’re building and also about the community round. I mean, whether or not anyone or you or our viewers ever invest in Noyack, I hope this helps everyone see where AI and the intersection of agentic AI and personal finance is really heading. This is the future and as long as you start thinking about your own wealth blueprint in that future, that’s what makes us happy.

If you’d like to join us on this journey, please come to our WeFunder and the minimum is $100. Invest whatever you’d like and we’d love to have you as part of the team.

Thank you again, Anna, for coming on and we will see both you and our viewers in our next installment when we dive deeper into these products, into our community round, into how people can get involved.

ANNA: Thanks, CJ.