Solaris Strategic Wealth is an independent wealth management firm focused on holistic financial planning for first-generation wealth builders, particularly women navigating major life transitions such as divorce or the loss of a spouse.

It’s also a small, fully virtual team.

That means Doug Milone, Solaris’s Managing Partner, is doing a lot of the work that larger companies might spread across an operations team, business analysts, project managers, and other support functions.

That’s what Doug was trying to solve when he first started experimenting with AI, and eventually became one of the early users of the Rhythm AI Connector.

The Challenge:

Your Strategy is Only as Good as What Happens After the Planning Meeting

Strategy lived in one place. Customer information lived somewhere else. Meeting notes were stored in another system. And Doug was left trying to connect the dots.

Doug was already trying to solve this problem himself before he knew Rhythm was building the AI Connector.

"I had actually reached out to the Product team at Rhythm before I knew that you guys were doing one. I had found out as I'm exploring AI on our side about MCP servers. I just tried to get everything connected to everything as best I could."

With the Rhythm AI Connector, Solaris could finally connect the systems it was already using (Rhythm, Salesforce, Notion, Outlook, and more) and give Claude the context to work across them.

Doug describes it as creating a "company brain."

"It's really the integration of sort of like a little bit of a company brain that we're creating using some of these AI tools."

Solaris also takes a deliberate approach to how AI is used with firm and client information. The firm uses SOC 2 Type 2-compliant systems, and client data is either sanitized before being used with AI tools or handled through AI systems specifically configured not to learn from the firm's data. AI-generated information is also subject to human review and oversight.

Catching What Humans Miss: 

An Extra Set of Eyes Across Every System

For Doug, the AI Connector gave Solaris another set of eyes across the business - one that can look at information from different systems and help surface connections or potential issues that a busy leadership team might not immediately see.

"We have all of this information in all of these different systems, and when we're trying to do planning and make sure the strategy is aligned... using Claude as kind of the glue between all of these different systems, it's kind of catching things that we might not have caught."

That might mean identifying that a team member's current workload doesn't realistically leave room for a new priority.

The latter is especially important, because sometimes the plan simply asks too much of the people who are supposed to execute it. AI can help surface those competing commitments, but the team reviews the information and makes the final decisions.

"Somewhere around week nine or ten, a whole lot of stuff goes yellow. It's not anything anyone's doing bad…it's just that we think we're going to get more done than we actually are."

The AI Connector can help flag those competing commitments earlier, giving the team another input to consider as they manage the plan.

Rowing Together:

Keeping a Virtual Team Focused on the Same Priorities

Solaris is fully virtual, and the team uses Miro heavily for brainstorming and planning.

That's great for generating ideas, but ideas aren't the same thing as execution.

One of Doug's use cases is having Claude take the ideas generated in Miro and turn them into structured Rhythm goals tied to the appropriate Winning Move.

"We just say, go get these stickies out here and turn them into goals that are related to this winning move."

Doug also created a template for how Solaris structures its goals so that they're consistent and easy for anyone on the team to understand.

"Anyone coming in could look at any different goal and they'd all read the same way and tie back to our different values."

The bigger benefit, though, is what happens when the team gets distracted by a good idea.

Claude helps reinforce the team's commitment to what they already decided mattered most.

"It's easy, when you're in that do mode, to get pulled into a good idea... and it's like, slow down, that's great, we can add it to our Miro board and maybe that'll get on the plan for next quarter. But really just focus on the things we committed to as a team."

From Data to Strategy: 

Finding What the Business Was Really Selling

The most interesting use of the AI Connector happened during a strategic reset.

Solaris had recently become an independent RIA - a major transition that created an opportunity to rethink where the business was going next.

Doug wanted to start by taking a closer look at real conversations with real clients.

The Solaris team then used months of internal meeting notes as an input for a strategic exercise, analyzing themes with Claude.

"We just started having a conversation with Claude about what we are really solving for clients. And it kind of put it in different words than we've used. And it's like, you're not doing financial planning. You're providing relief."

It changed how Solaris thought about the entire business.

The insight helped the team sharpen its purpose and get more specific about the clients it wanted to serve.

And when that thinking made its way into quarterly planning, Claude provided another perspective the team could consider as it developed and refined the plan. Final strategic decisions remained with the Solaris team.

Client information used in these types of exercises is handled according to Solaris's data and privacy safeguards, including the use of AI systems that do not learn from the firm's data.

The Bigger Opportunity: 

Give a Small Team Bigger-Capability Thinking

Doug isn't interested in giving everyone at Solaris a giant library of pre-built AI prompts. Instead, he wants his team to understand how to build AI around the work they actually do.

"I suspect everybody's using it a little bit differently. Trying to create standardized skills and give that to everybody is probably less valuable than teaching people how to think about and how to create skills. Then they can make them more specific to their team or their company."

That philosophy gets to the heart of what AI can mean for any mid-market company. It's not about replacing the team, but about giving the team access to capabilities they wouldn't otherwise have.

That's the "company brain" advantage: AI can help with more of the preparation, connecting, and monitoring, while people remain responsible for reviewing the information, applying judgment, and making decisions.

Like any AI tool, AI-generated output requires appropriate human review. The goal isn't to remove people from the process, but to give them another set of capabilities while maintaining the oversight and judgment that the work requires.

And for Solaris, it ultimately comes back to the reason why they used Rhythm in the first place: keeping the strategy connected to what actually happens after the planning meeting.