Understanding and Using Relationship Intelligence

Learning Team

Some of the functionality described in this article is available as part of our Fiano release and will not be available if your Practifi instance is not upgraded to this release.

Overview

Relationship Intelligence is part of the Practifi Intelligence suite, helping you know what to say, when to say it, and why it matters. It helps firms move from reactive to proactive relationship management by turning every note, meeting, and milestone into a clear picture of each relationship. With AI-powered tools like Chat, Follow-up Assistant, and Smart Notes built directly into the Practifi platform, key details never get lost, tasks are automatically created, and client conversations become more natural, informed, and impactful.

This article outlines how to use Relationship Intelligence features to eliminate manual meeting documentation, surface key client data, and ensure consistent follow-through across your team.

Please note: Relationship Intelligence is a part of our Practifi Intelligence add-on. To request access to this feature, please reach out to your Client Success Manager or Practifi contact. Enabling Relationship Intelligence requires signing additional data processing agreements as part of our partnership with our AI provider.

What Is Relationship Intelligence?
Smart Notes
Follow-up Assistant
Chat
Integration With Meeting Intelligence
Best Practices

What Is Relationship Intelligence?

Traditional CRMs track activities but rarely tell the full story of a client's life or the nuances that shape their decisions. Practifi's Relationship Intelligence add-on redefines this approach by providing:

Complete relationship context

Instant access to recent interactions, emotional signals, family connections, and upcoming priorities.
A dynamic view that updates automatically as new information is captured.
A unified picture of the relationship becomes accessible to all authorized team members.

Proactive engagement tools

Automated suggestions for follow-up tasks based on meeting content.
AI-generated preparation materials for upcoming client interactions.
Pre-built templates that surface relevant client information.
A conversational interface that lets your team ask questions in plain language and receive synthesized, actionable answers grounded in client data.

Scalable personalization

Consistent depth of care across all clients, regardless of team size.
Standardized approaches that maintain a personal touch.
Context preservation when multiple advisors serve a single client.

Relationship Intelligence isn't automation for its own sake; it's an augmentation that allows advisors to deliver a high-touch experience to more clients without compromising quality.

Smart Notes

Smart Notes are AI-powered collaborative documents for capturing client insights, preparing for meetings, and recording important relationship details. They work like a living client file that your entire team can contribute to and access in real time, ensuring a consistent view of every relationship regardless of who last touched it.

Creating a Smart Note From a Pre-Built Template

Practifi provides two pre-built templates:

Relationship Brief: A comprehensive snapshot that brings together key details, such as contact information, relationships, assets, and recent activities, into a single document, giving your team a complete view of each relationship at a glance.
Meeting Brief: Prepare for client meetings efficiently with synthesized relationship information and ready-to-use talking points. This template helps advisors enter conversations fully informed without spending hours reviewing records.

To create a Smart Note from a pre-built template:

Click the + icon in the Smart Notes area of a Client record. The Create Smart Note window opens.
Select Use a Template, then click Continue.
Select Relationship Brief or Meeting Brief, then click Create. The Smart Note begins generating.

Smart Notes are stored directly in Practifi, linked to the relevant client or household record. Once generated, they're accessible to anyone on your team.

For more information about these prebuilt templates, see Creating and Using AI-Generated Smart Notes.

Please note: Access to these templates requires a Relationship Intelligence license.

Working With AI Content Blocks

Smart Notes can include AI-generated content blocks that automatically pull relevant information from your Practifi data and other sources, such as financial news. These content blocks help you prepare for meetings, understand relationship context, and document interactions more efficiently.

To add an AI-generated content block to a Smart Note:

Open an existing Smart Note or create a new one.
Click Add Content Block in the Smart Note Editor.
Select the content block from the list on the left-hand side of the window, then click Add Content Block.
The AI will generate the content block based on current Practifi data.
Click Save to preserve your changes.

Please note: Access to AI-generated content blocks requires a Relationship Intelligence license.

You can also create your own Smart Note templates and add AI-generated content blocks. To learn more, see Creating and Using AI-Generated Smart Notes.

Collaborating on Smart Notes

Smart Notes support real-time collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work in the same document simultaneously.

Collaboration features:

Multiple users can edit the same Smart Note.
Changes are synchronized across all users when the Smart Note is saved.
Comment threads allow team members to discuss specific sections, keeping the conversation in context alongside the relevant client data.

To collaborate on a Smart Note:

Open the Smart Note you want to work on collaboratively.
@mention team members in the body of the note or within a comment.
Mentioned team members will receive a system notification, an email, or both, depending on your organization's settings.
All authorized users can simultaneously view and edit the content.

Please note: Smart Notes do not autosave. Be sure to click Save to preserve any changes.

To learn more about collaborating on Smart Notes, see Understanding and Using Smart Notes.

Exporting Smart Notes

Smart Notes includes built-in PDF export functionality, allowing you to download any Smart Note as a professionally formatted PDF document for external sharing, printing, or archival purposes. PDFs preserve all Smart Note formatting, including bold, italics, headings, and lists. Tables are preserved with proper structure and spacing. Content blocks appear exactly as they do in the Smart Note.

Please note: Enabling the Export to PDF feature requires additional configuration. For instructions on how to do this, see our article on Enabling Smart Notes.

You can export Smart Notes to PDF from the following locations:

From an Entity or Event record, click the caret on any Smart Note card and select Export PDF.
On the Smart Notes app page, select a Smart Note, then click the caret and select Export PDF.

A confirmation message appears, and the PDF is downloaded to your device. Smart Note PDFs are automatically named with the related entity's name and the Smart Note title, making them easy to identify and organize in your Downloads folder.

Please note: Images are currently not supported in PDF exports. If you export a Smart Note that contains one or more images, they are removed from the exported PDF. The images remain in the actual Smart Note within Practifi.

Follow-up Assistant

Follow-up Assistant is an AI-powered feature that automatically analyzes your meetings, emails, and client interactions to suggest relevant tasks, workflow triggers, and next steps. It ensures nothing falls through the cracks and helps you stay proactive with client relationships.

How Follow-up Assistant Works

Follow-up Assistant analyzes the content of notes, Smart Notes, and Feed posts to identify commitments, action items, and relationship opportunities. It understands your firm's existing workflows and suggests relevant tasks and processes based on the discussion.

What Follow-up Assistant can suggest:

Templated tasks from your firm's task library
Process workflows that match discussed actions (e.g., account opening, beneficiary updates)
Custom tasks with pre-filled descriptions based on meeting content
Timeline recommendations for when follow-ups should occur

The system uses confidence scoring to determine which suggestions to surface. Higher-confidence suggestions are more likely to be relevant and actionable. Practifi Administrators can adjust the confidence threshold to control the volume and accuracy of suggestions.

Accessing Follow-up Assistant

Follow-up Assistant suggestions appear in the following locations:

On the Home Page: The Follow-up Assistant area in the sidebar displays recent suggestions for all your clients and prospects. This provides a consolidated view of recommended actions needing your attention.
On Client/Prospect Records: A Follow-up Assistant section appears on the record page, showing suggestions specific to that client or prospect. This contextual view helps you take action while already focused on the relationship.
In the Smart Note Editor: Click the Generate Suggestions button in the header of the editor to generate suggestions based on the content of the note.

Reviewing and Accepting Suggestions

When Follow-up Assistant generates suggestions, you maintain complete control over which actions to accept.

To review and accept suggestions:

Navigate to either the Home Page widget or a specific Client/Prospect record.
Locate the Follow-up Assistant section that shows available suggestions, then click the checkmark icon.
In the Complete Follow-up window, review each suggested action, including:
- Action type: Whether it's a task, process, or workflow
- Description: What the suggestion involves
- Assignee: The team member who will execute the process or task
- Due Date: When the task will be due
Click the X icon to decline any suggestions.
Edit task names, descriptions, assignees, and due dates as needed.
Click Complete to generate the follow-up items.

For more information on reviewing Follow-up Assistant suggestions, see Understanding and Using Follow-up Assistant.

Chat

Chat is a conversational interface that brings the full depth of your clients' data into a single, natural-language experience. Instead of moving through multiple screens to get a complete view of a client relationship, your team can ask questions in plain language and receive synthesized, actionable answers based on everything Practifi knows about that relationship.

Chat goes beyond simple data retrieval. Advisors can use it to prepare for meetings by pulling together recent activity, outstanding action items, and key relationship context in one pass. They can draft client communications grounded in actual data rather than starting from scratch. And because Chat remembers everything discussed in a conversation, your team can start broad and narrow in, asking follow-up questions and building on previous answers without re-establishing context each time.

Your team can open Chat directly from any Household, Organization, or Individual record page and ask questions as they would to a colleague. The assistant draws on client data and any external news sources your administrator has configured. Responses include cited sources with direct links to the underlying records, so your team can verify details and navigate to the source with a single click.

Where to Access Chat

Chat is available in two locations:

On record pages: Chat appears as its own section on Household, Organization, and Individual record pages. Navigate to it using the Chat navigation icon in the record side panel. The Chat section includes a text input, any prompt templates your administrator has configured, and your recent and pinned conversations for that record. The Chat section will appear automatically for Practifi organizations that use standard page layouts, provided users have a Relationship Intelligence license and the Chat feature is toggled on.
On the Chat page: Select Chat from the Navigation menu to see all your conversations across every relationship. From here, you can search, browse, and start new conversations.

Managing Your Conversations

Conversations are given the default name "New Conversation" when you initiate a new chat. The conversation is automatically renamed based on the content of the first response. You can also:

Rename a conversation by clicking the Edit button and entering a new title.
Pin a conversation to keep it easily accessible. Pinned conversations appear above your recent conversations on every surface, both on record pages and on the Chat page.
Export a conversation as a plain text file using the export action in the conversation header.
Delete a conversation using the delete action in the conversation header. You will be asked to confirm before deletion.

What the Assistant Can Access

To enable Chat to access conversations and notes, administrators can do the following:

Navigate to Settings.
Select Intelligence Features.
Select Chat.
Click the Sources tab.
Enable the Allow Chat to access conversations and notes setting.

When enabled, Chat indexes historical CRM data, including Smart Notes, traditional notes, the Feed, and email messages, giving the assistant access to rich historical context when answering questions about a client. New records are automatically indexed in real time after the initial setup.

Before enabling, administrators will see a prompt explaining that clicking Okay makes future data available immediately and starts an import process for historical data, with progress visible on the same page. Chat remains fully usable during the initial migration, and advisors can continue to ask questions using live structured data, such as services, deals, and household details. Only historical unstructured data will be unavailable until migration completes, which may take some time for organizations with large data volumes.

Once activated, administrators can use the Resync button to manually trigger a full re-send of data if information appears to be missing, such as after a bulk data import. The Deactivate button turns off the feature and removes all indexed data. Re-enabling the feature requires running the full migration again.

Practifi Administrators can also choose from multiple external news sources by navigating to Settings, selecting Intelligence Features, then Chat, and clicking the Sources tab.

Please note: Chat is part of the Practifi Intelligence add-on and is available to users with Relationship Intelligence licenses. If you're interested in this functionality, please reach out to your Client Success Manager or Practifi contact.

Integration With Meeting Intelligence

Relationship Intelligence works seamlessly with Meeting Intelligence features to create a complete documentation and follow-up workflow:

During the meeting, AI Notetaker (part of Meeting Intelligence) captures the conversation.
After the meeting, a meeting summary is generated. It can be automatically stored as a Smart Note linked to the related entity, giving your team a formatted, searchable record of the meeting alongside their other notes.
In Smart Notes, you can add meeting summaries for a complete relationship context.
Follow-up Assistant analyzes the meeting content and suggests relevant next steps.

This integrated approach ensures that insights captured during meetings immediately become actionable within your existing CRM workflows.

Best Practices

For Smart Notes:

Create Smart Notes before meetings to prepare with AI-generated briefing content.
Use consistent naming conventions for Smart Note subjects to improve searchability.
Leverage AI content blocks to reduce manual data entry and ensure consistency.
Export client-ready PDFs after meetings to provide professional documentation.
Encourage team collaboration on complex client situations with multiple stakeholders.

For Follow-up Assistant:

Review suggestions promptly after meetings while the context is fresh.
Work with your System Administrator to adjust confidence thresholds if you're receiving too many or too few suggestions.
Include detailed meeting notes to improve the accuracy of suggestions.
Ensure process and task templates have clear descriptions to help the Follow-up Assistant make better matches.

For Chat:

Use Chat before meetings to quickly pull together recent activity, outstanding action items, and key relationship context without navigating through multiple screens.
Pin conversations that are likely to be referenced repeatedly, such as ongoing planning discussions or active service reviews.
Start broad and narrow in. Chat retains context throughout a conversation, so you can build on previous answers without re-establishing the background each time.
Ask your administrator to enable access to conversations and notes so Chat can draw on the full history of your client relationships.

For overall Relationship Intelligence adoption:

Start with a pilot group to establish best practices before firm-wide rollout.
Create standardized content block templates for common meeting types.
Advise team members on both the technical features and the strategic value of proactive relationship management.
Monitor adoption metrics to ensure consistent usage across the team.
Regularly review and refine your firm's processes and task templates to optimize Follow-up Assistant suggestions.