Recently, I sat down with one of our Financial Advisors and asked what she’d done with the ten hours a week she’d gotten back from a new AI tool we’d piloted. She didn’t have to think much about it. “I’ve had more time to work with clients,” she said. That’s what I actually care about. Not the 10 hours saved, but what we’re able to do with them.
- The Million-Dollar Question For nearly 70 years, First Command has coached military families through some of the most challenging financial stretches life can bring, whether it’s PCS moves, deployments, career changes or the reality of trying to save for college and retirement when your mailing address changes every few years. Doing this work for so long has taught us that client experience isn’t a company function, and it isn’t a survey score you check once a quarter. At its simplest, the client experience is defined as whether our work makes life better for the military families we coach.
That’s the filter our decisions pass through, whether we’re hiring someone, launching a product or investing in new technology. Efficiency matters, but efficiency alone isn’t progress. The investment also has to make us better at serving our clients. I’ve carried that focus with me through every role I’ve held at First Command. I joined the company in 2016 as Chief Marketing Officer. In 2019, my role expanded to Chief Marketing and Client Experience Officer, bringing experience design, client service, financial products and digital solutions together under one leader for the first time.
When I became Chief Operating Officer in 2025, the scope changed again, but the focus didn’t. Today, I oversee technology, experience design and innovation, digital solutions, data and artificial intelligence strategy, service, business architecture and operations. Each of those functions plays a part in improving the experience for the military families we coach and the people who coach them. One of the first things I did in my new role was rename our operations function
Experience, Technology and Operations. A name doesn’t change a business by itself, but it does make our priorities clear. Technology and operations are there to support the experience, not the other way around. This mantra has always been at the forefront of our work at First Command and is particularly relevant in today’s AI-focused environment.
- Why This Matters for Military Families Client experience should look different from one company to the next because the people being served are different. Here’s how we look at providing a better client experience. At First Command, roughly 75% of our Financial Advisors are military veterans or spouses.1 That experience matters. They understand what military life can do to a family’s finances because many of them have lived it themselves.
They know that 87% of military spouses say they are primarily responsible for managing household finances. They also understand why employer-sponsored retirement benefits may never vest when a permanent change of station makes staying with one employer difficult.
Those realities shape the kind of financial guidance military families need. Our clients aren’t looking for another transaction. They want a coach who understands the lives behind the numbers.
- Our AI Strategy That same thinking guides how we’re approaching AI. We’re not using AI to replace relationships. We’re using it to give people more time for them. We’re already seeing what that can look like. Corporate teams have adopted our new productivity tools at a 92.6% rate. In a completed pilot with our Financial Advisor field force, the tools saved an average of 12 hours of administrative work per Advisor. More importantly, that time can go back into client meetings. At the home office, employees are getting time back that can be spent on upskilling, retraining and higher-level work that too often gets pushed aside by the demands of the day. The value isn’t simply that AI helps people work faster. It’s that it creates room for work we haven’t had enough time to do. Getting there, however, requires work that isn’t nearly as exciting as talking about AI.
Ensuring data quality is a good example. AI is only as useful as the information behind it. Like many companies, we’ve had valuable information that’s been spread across documents, policies and systems that weren’t designed to work together.
We’ve invested significant time and resources in organizing that unstructured data and improving its quality.
It’s messy work, but it’s necessary. I’d rather do it correctly up front than give our Advisors information in a tool they can’t trust. That’s the difference between AI that makes for a good presentation and AI that people can confidently use in their work. We’re also treating AI as a long-term shift rather than a short-term technology project. We’ve established a Chief Data and AI Officer role, developed a formal AI roadmap and governance model, and created a workforce transformation plan so our employees can prepare for how their work will change.
Our innovation efforts also bring research and testing directly to clients, Advisors and employees. That helps us understand not only where AI can be useful, but where it can solve real problems for the people we serve. At the same time, we’re investing in our data foundation, addressing the technology debt that could slow us down later, and building systems that can grow with us.
None of those investments are especially flashy. They’re what make the flashy things possible.
- Measuring What We Value Client-facing Advisors and service associates at First Command are measured against defined client experience standards. These standards include a combination of metrics that can be benchmarked and also known to matter to our clients, including client satisfaction, sentiment, effort, engagement, loyalty, and willingness to recommend First Command.
That’s intentional. If we’re going to say client experience is one of our differentiators, we have to be willing to measure it. Otherwise, it’s just something we say and we’re not holding ourselves to any standards.
The standards give us a way to hold ourselves accountable and make sure the experience we’re promising is the one our clients are actually receiving.
- The Big Picture There’s a broader lesson here for leaders, whether they’re in financial services or any other industry.
Don’t measure the return on a technology investment only by the hours it saves or the costs it cuts. Ask what those savings make possible.
If better technology gives an Advisor more time to sit across from a military family and understand what they’re worried about, that’s meaningful. If it gives an employee time to learn a new skill or finally tackle work that’s been sitting on the back burner, that matters too. Better tools should lead to better conversations, not fewer of them.
What our clients value hasn’t fundamentally changed, and I don’t expect it to. They want a Financial Advisor they can trust, someone who understands their unique circumstances and can provide sound guidance.
My job is to make sure everything we build, especially the technology, helps our people deliver that experience. It should strengthen the relationship, never substitute for it.
1Firm statistics as of October 2025. 2The Hidden Financial Costs of Military Spouse Unemployment research, Hiring Our Heroes 3Based on self-reported survey responses from participants in a First Command pilot conducted May 4 through June 1, 2026. Data was analyzed by First Command using information provided by Zocks Analytics. Individual results may vary.
©2026 First Command Financial Services, Inc. parent of First Command Brokerage Services, Inc. (Member SIPC, FINRA).