“How do you start using AI in a smart way to delegate the basic, boring tasks off your plate so that you can redistribute that to something of higher value, or even something that just makes you more excited?”
It’s a question at the center of Monday morning’s general session at the 2026 NAPA 401(k) Summit in Tampa, Fla.
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Titled “The AI Productivity Boost: How You Can Reclaim Time, Sharpen Focus, and Stay Human,” New York Times bestselling author Joe Mechlinski, founder and CEO of SHIFT, a tech-enabled management consulting firm, brought his 25 years of tech experience and data from surveying approximately 100,000 employees to the advisors in the audience.
“We’ve been in the trenches for the last three-plus years,” Mechlinski said in a pre-presentation interview. “We’ve helped almost 35,000 people become proficient in using AI, so everything that we’re going to talk about is from the field.”
It’s a refreshing approach for an AI-focused conference keynote, which too often provides a “holistic view” rather than getting specific, leaving attendees wondering what to do next, or even how to begin the AI business integration process.
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While AI’s effect on the macro-economic environment is widely discussed, at its heart, it’s still what Mechlinski called a “single player game.”
“There’s me versus my baseline of work, right?” he said. “We’ve got Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to our work, but a light bulb goes off when they think about use cases that they hadn’t thought of before, and that can fundamentally change the way you work and live.”
He claimed that companies that offer just one or two AI tools can result in “about 30% to 50% of the employee’s time back to them in 90 days.
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Mentioning Jevons paradox, the observation that technological innovation increases rather than decreases demand and consumption (in this case, time dedicated to work), he used electric vehicles (EVs) as an example of why AI will make us work harder — at least initially.
“EVs didn’t mean that we were going to drive less,” Mechlinski explained. “We’ve been driving more. One of the second-order effects right now of using AI is that you’re actually working more, and with greater intensity. The difference, at least for me, is that I feel like I’m accomplishing so much more, and I’m so much more excited. You’re bringing your heart, creativity, and imagination to speak your ideas into existence.”
Employing a variation of the popular adage, “Ideas are easy, execution is everything,” he said it’s an opportunity for non-technical people to be hyper-technical and articulate problems and solutions in new and different ways.
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And if advisors move fast enough, they’ll still be early adopters.
He recounted a recent conversation with an advisor who, within months of using AI, uploaded his personal financial information and received a more personalized and detailed financial plan than he’d provided to clients for over 25 years.
“From a financial advising standpoint, I think it’s time not just to get paid for your intelligence and experience, but for your judgment, creativity, and your taste,” Mechlinski concluded. “If you’re an RIA, you should be growing revenue without growing headcount. This is your chance to articulate your vision. If there was ever a moment in time to use your voice, to have a vote, and to create this new vision moving forward, it is now.”