Founder and CEO
The Oasis Group
John O’Connell has more than 30 years of leadership experience in both emerging businesses and mature, established organizations. He started his career designing and developing financial applications at Merrill Lynch and KPMG Peat Marwick. He was a member of the team for an IPO, sale of a firm, and packaging 2 other firms for sale. He held North American leadership positions at Oracle for over 8 years. He was the president of a FinTech firm and held C-level customer facing roles at two global, publicly traded companies.
John is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer for The Oasis Group. A firm specializing in helping wealth management and technology firms to solve their most complex challenges. The Oasis Group helps firms with technology selection and implementation, sales processes and strategy, and processes to attract, sell, propose, onboard, and service new clients.
John is the author of Rise of The Activist Investor, a handbook for investors who would like their money to reflect their values by exercising their rights as owners of publicly traded firms. He invented the Activist Investor Arc to describe how retail investors progress through different phases of activist investing.
John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science & Mathematics from the College of Staten Island and an MBA in Finance from Rider University.
The conversation about AI in wealth management has been dominated by tools. Which ones to evaluate, which ones to buy, and which ones to avoid. That conversation is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The firms that will define the next decade of advisory services are not just selecting AI tools. They are building AI coworkers.
An AI coworker is not a chatbot. It is not a search engine with a conversational interface. It is a purpose-built specialist, engineered with a defined role, loaded with domain-specific knowledge, governed by professional guardrails, and calibrated to reflect the firm’s voice and standards. The difference between a firm that uses AI and a firm that employs AI is the difference between a productivity gain and a structural advantage.
In this session, attendees will be walked through the architecture, the archetypes, and the practical framework for building AI coworkers that perform at a professional level.
Attendees will leave with a framework for building their first AI coworker, a clear-eyed understanding of the organizational prerequisites that determine whether deployment succeeds or stalls, and a reusable job description structure they can apply to any specialist role they choose to build.
This high-impact session will showcase how wealth managers can leverage today’s leading AI tools to enhance every step of their business process. John’s session will feature live demonstrations of tools like Claude, ChatGPT, CoPilot, Perplexity, Gamma, and more to show how you can leverage off the shelf AI tools today to enhance your practice. Attendees will walk away with a handout of actionable use cases they can implement immediately upon returning to their offices. By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
– Understand how generative AI fits into the daily workflows of wealth management.
– Identify at least five practical, low-lift AI use cases across the client lifecycle.
– Evaluate and experiment with leading AI tools suited for advisors and support staff.
– Design a basic AI pilot plan for their practice or firm.