landing – Our Story Insight https://www.ourstoryinsight.com Product that tells our story Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:05:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Capture-removebg-preview-22-e1635416645194-150x150.png landing – Our Story Insight https://www.ourstoryinsight.com 32 32 Advisors to rich say AI isn’t a gamechanger for landing new clients https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/advisors-to-rich-say-ai-isnt-a-gamechanger-for-landing-new-clients/ https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/advisors-to-rich-say-ai-isnt-a-gamechanger-for-landing-new-clients/#respond Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:55:53 +0000 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/?p=12678 D3sign | Moment | Getty Images A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Market data firms have been pitching artificial intelligence as the key to locating elusive ultra-high-net-worth clients. But […]

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D3sign | Moment | Getty Images

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

Market data firms have been pitching artificial intelligence as the key to locating elusive ultra-high-net-worth clients. But leaders at elite advisory firms told Inside Wealth they aren’t sold.

For starters, while AI products can surface data and contact information on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, that’s only half the battle.

“When we’re looking for clients with north of $100 million, I struggle to think they’re going to take a cold email and say, ‘Yes, here’s my balance sheet,'” said Matthew Fleissig, CEO and co-founder of Pathstone, a registered investor advisory with $182 billion in client assets.

Instead, he said referrals come when the company works on a more personal level, like when Pathstone once secured a private jet in under an hour for a client who needed to get from New Orleans to Albany, New York, before their mother died.

“Those types of things are how we are able to grow the business,” he said. “We create moments that matter.”

Fleissig said AI for client prospecting hasn’t been the gamechanger that startups purport it to be.

“These databases have been around forever, and now people have added an AI overlay to be able to mine the database,” he said. “Most of the time, it’s very similar strategies of aggregating data sources that are public or you can pay for, and trying to feed you lists of people. We, at this point, can do that ourselves.”

A growth executive at a high-end national RIA told Inside Wealth that he had done at least 20 demos of AI client prospecting tools in the past six months and said most are built on widely available large language models like Claude and GPT.

“You’re slapping a coat of paint on one of five major LLMs and selling through the fact that ‘Oh our info is better,'” said the executive, who requested anonymity to talk about client acquisition strategies. “Do I pay them $100,000 or do I talk to my IT team and figure out a way of doing it for cents on the dollar?”

Andrew Douglass, head of growth at AlTi Tiedemann Global, said there is little competitive advantage to using nonexclusive data. When the independent wealth management firm used to cold call clients from these types of databases, the client usually already had an advisor or had been called by dozens of other firms already, he said.

For the past five years, client referrals and personal networks have made up 40% and 30%, respectively, of AlTi’s organic growth, he said. Another 30% comes from networking with experts like trusts and estates lawyers and accountants who are likely to be working with clients going through a liquidity event, such as inheriting a fortune or selling a business.

“Most people go out and say, ‘Our minimums are $25 million so whoever has $25 million in liquid assets makes a great client.’ We don’t think that that is a strategy that ultimately works,” said Douglass, calling from the Heckerling estate planning conference in Orlando, Florida. “We think really being looked at in the market as a subject matter expert, consistently showing up to places like Heckerling and where the professional community is and being able to provide value, is the most effective way to grow the business,”

Word-of-mouth referrals are not inherently scalable and can be slow-going. Douglass said the sales cycle with an ultra-high-net-worth client can take 12 months, if not longer.

However, advisories focused on the ultra-rich like AlTi Global are looking for quality, not quantity, he said. The firm’s annual target for organic growth is 25 to 30 new clients in the U.S., which could add about $1.5 billion to $2 billion in new assets.

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Eden Ovadia, CEO of AI client prospecting startup Finny, said she is used to encountering skepticism. Ovadia, who co-founded Finny in late 2023, said she views AI prospecting as a complement to traditional outreach rather than a replacement.

She said a popular way for high-end advisors to use Finny is to promote exclusive events to the right audience. For instance, an advisor looking to invite prospects to a suite at a Miami Heat game can use Finny to identify people who work in real estate and are interested in the team. Ovadia also said Finny can be used to identify clients who might need advice after a life transition, such as finding people who recently bought a property worth at least $5 million near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“There’s definitely a little bit of cynicism we have to get over when we talk to ultra-high-net-worth firms and they’re, ‘No, we don’t do AI. We want everything to feel really personalized, really white glove,'” she said. “I couldn’t agree more. The idea here is we actually can surface more data about your clients or your prospects than even you know.”

Finny can also be used to keep an eye on existing clients and monitor for signs they may be unhappy, such as searching for investment advice online, Ovadia said.

Fleissig said he is more excited about customers finding Pathstone through AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT. In the past two weeks, he said, Pathstone has received five inbound inquiries from clients worth at least $100 million from AI search engines.

Douglass said while AI hasn’t changed the way AlTi Global finds new business, he’s open-minded.

“If someone has a better mousetrap, we’re certainly excited about what the market’s going to look like and bring to bear,” he said.

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]]> https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/advisors-to-rich-say-ai-isnt-a-gamechanger-for-landing-new-clients/feed/ 0 How to Watch Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 Moon Landing https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-fireflys-blue-ghost-mission-1-moon-landing/ https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-fireflys-blue-ghost-mission-1-moon-landing/#respond Sun, 02 Mar 2025 06:28:56 +0000 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/?p=5593 The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface. The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday. […]

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The moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.

The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday.

The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel.

This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.

That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed.

Blue Ghost is the third CLPS mission to launch to the moon. The first, in 2024, from Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, failed after launching. The second, by Intuitive Machines of Houston last year, reached the moon but tipped over.

The physics of getting to a certain place in the solar system at a certain time does not always match when people will be awake to watch. The Blue Ghost lander spacecraft gets its power from solar panels, and thus the mission is aiming to land soon after the dawn of a new lunar day. And to get to Mare Crisium on March 2, the landing time turns out to be 3:45 a.m.

“That’s just when that happens,” said Ray Allensworth, the program manager for Blue Ghost at Firefly.

The mission is to last about 14 Earth days until lunar sunset.

Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on Feb. 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface.

A few small glitches have come up along the way, but no major malfunctions. Mostly, the mission controllers made adjustments as they learned how the spacecraft behaved in the space environment.

“Thermal alarms might go off,” Ms. Allensworth said. “Things are getting a little hotter than planned, a little colder than planned on the vehicle. You want to look at that data and see is it actually OK.”

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload. That turned out to be the Blue Ghost launch.

Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.

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]]> https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-fireflys-blue-ghost-mission-1-moon-landing/feed/ 0 How to Watch the Launch of Intuitive Machines’s Second Moon Landing Mission https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-the-launch-of-intuitive-machiness-second-moon-landing-mission/ https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-the-launch-of-intuitive-machiness-second-moon-landing-mission/#respond Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:10:34 +0000 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/?p=5530 Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time? When the spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down on the moon last February, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially […]

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Intuitive Machines landed a robot on the moon last year. Can the Houston company do it again, but keep the spacecraft upright this time?

When the spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down on the moon last February, it managed to communicate with Earth even though it had toppled on its side. It was the first commercially operated lander to reach the moon’s surface, and the first American vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The company’s second lander, named Athena, is now on the launchpad. Here’s what you need to know about Wednesday’s flight.

Athena and three other spacecraft will launch on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch is scheduled for 7:16 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 26. There is a greater than 95 percent chance of favorable weather and SpaceX said about less than an hour before the flight that fueling of the moon lander had been completed.

If weather or technical issues arise, backup opportunities will be available during a four-day launch window. After that, the mission would have to be delayed by a month.

NASA will provide coverage of the launch beginning about 45 minutes before liftoff. You can watch it on the agency’s YouTube channel, or in the video player embedded above.

If the launch occurs Wednesday, the Intuitive Machines spacecraft will try to land on March 6 in Mons Mouton, a region about 100 miles from the moon’s south pole. That will be closer to the south pole than any previous lunar lander.

The main payload is a drill for NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Paying a commercial company like Intuitive Machines to take something to the moon is cheaper than having NASA design and build its own spacecraft.

The drill is designed to dig up soil up to about three feet below the surface. It will extract lunar soil about four inches at a time. An instrument known as a mass spectrometer will then sniff around the drilled material for compounds like frozen water that easily transform into gases.

The Athena lander is also carrying three robotic rovers and a small flying “hopper” that will be deployed after landing.

The largest rover, known as the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, or MAPP, is part of a NASA-financed test of the first cellphone network on the moon. Nokia won financing from the space agency to test the technology but then needed a way to move at least one antenna some distance from the lander. So Nokia hired a company called Lunar Outpost to build the rover, which is about the size of a small dog.

Lunar Outpost sold space on MAPP to other customers. One, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a tiny rover called AstroAnt, which will crawl around on the top flat surface of MAPP.

Athena will also deploy a rover called Yaoki, built by a Japanese company, Dymon, that is a bit bigger than a Mac mini computer.

Intuitive Machines built the hopper as part of another NASA contract. The small rocket-powered craft could offer new opportunities to explore long distances, similar to the way NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars provided a different way to explore areas not easily reached on the ground.

On the airless moon, helicopters cannot fly, but thrusters will allow the hopper to fly long distances. It will also be carrying one of the Nokia cellphone antennas. The plan is to fly into one of the moon’s permanently shadowed craters.

The mission on the surface is scheduled to last for less than one lunar day, or about 10 Earth days, until the sun sets. With no solar energy, the spacecraft’s batteries will run out of power.

But in the middle of the lunar day, on March 14 at about 2 a.m. Eastern time, darkness will fall for a few minutes — an eclipse when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon.

The solar-powered lander will have to draw power from its batteries during the eclipse but should survive.

The Odysseus lander was supposed to use a laser altimeter to help guide it to the moon’s surface. But because of an oversight during the launch preparations, a safety switch for the device was never disabled, rendering that tool useless. Engineers at Intuitive Machines hurriedly rewrote their landing software to use similar measurements from an experimental NASA instrument on the spacecraft. But they missed updating one key parameter in the computer code, and the landing software ignored the data.

The spacecraft thus landed oblivious to its exact altitude, only guessing its distance above the surface based on horizontal speed calculated from camera images and measurements of accelerations in the spacecraft’s velocity. The guesses were close enough that it did not crash, although it was still moving horizontally. The landing gear broke, and the spacecraft tipped.

The Athena lander is almost identical to Odysseus — each is what the company calls its Nova-C design — and Intuitive Machines officials said they had tested the laser multiple times.

Three more separate spacecraft are riding on the Falcon 9 rocket. They are essentially taking advantage of extra payload space in the rocket for a cheaper ride to space.

One, Lunar Trailblazer, is a lost-cost NASA mission — about $100 million — designed to measure the distribution of water on the moon from orbit.

While Athena will make a quick one-week trip to the moon, Lunar Trailblazer will take a more leisurely, fuel-efficient path. If launch occurs on Wednesday, it will take just over four months to reach the moon. (If the launch occurs on a different day, the trajectory changes, and the journey could be as long as seven months.)

A second spacecraft, Odin, is a microwave-size spacecraft built by the company AstroForge of California. It will head to a near-Earth asteroid to examine whether it might be full of valuable metals that could be mined in the future.

A third vehicle, CHIMERA GEO 1, is a spacecraft from Epic Aerospace of San Francisco designed to put small satellites in distant orbits.

Athena is the third commercial lander launched toward the moon this year, although it might be the second to arrive.

On Jan. 15, a Falcon 9 rocket launched carrying the other two landers — Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and Resilience by Ispace of Japan.

Blue Ghost, like Athena, is part of NASA’s CLPS program, and it is scheduled to land on March 2, ahead of Athena. It is headed toward Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

Resilience, also known as the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, is taking an indirect route and is expected to arrive at the moon in May. Its landing site is near the center of Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, in the moon’s northern hemisphere. This will be Ispace’s second lunar landing attempt. Its first mission, in 2023, crashed.

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]]> https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/how-to-watch-the-launch-of-intuitive-machiness-second-moon-landing-mission/feed/ 0 Delta plane crashes on landing at Toronto airport, injuring at least 15 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/delta-plane-crashes-on-landing-at-toronto-airport-injuring-at-least-15/ https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/delta-plane-crashes-on-landing-at-toronto-airport-injuring-at-least-15/#respond Tue, 18 Feb 2025 01:06:12 +0000 https://www.ourstoryinsight.com/?p=5356 First responders work at the Delta Air Lines plane crash site at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada February 17, 2025. Arlyn Mcadorey | Reuters At least 15 people were injured after a Delta Air Lines regional jet crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday afternoon, officials said. All 80 people […]

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First responders work at the Delta Air Lines plane crash site at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada February 17, 2025.

Arlyn Mcadorey | Reuters

At least 15 people were injured after a Delta Air Lines regional jet crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday afternoon, officials said.

All 80 people on board — 76 passengers and four crew members — were evacuated from the plane, a CRJ-900 regional jet, after the accident, which occurred at about 2:45 p.m. ET, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Two people were airlifted in critical condition, according to Peel Regional Paramedic Services.

Emergency crews responded at the scene. Flights to the airport were temporarily halted but resumed as of 5 p.m. ET.

Delta said in a statement it was cancelling the remainder of its flights to and from Toronto Monday and issuing travel waivers to affected passengers.

“The hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident at Toronto-Pearson International Airport,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in the statement. “I want to express my thanks to the many Delta and Endeavor team members and the first responders on site.”

Delta Flight 4819, operated by the carrier’s regional subsidiary Endeavor, originated in Delta’s hub of Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport.

The Toronto airport said it had been expecting a busy day and a storm that dumped more than 8 inches of snow on the region, with an expected 130,000 travelers on board around 1,000 flights.

Weather reports showed wind of between 20 mph and 30 mph Monday, with gusts of up to 40 mph.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada will lead the crash investigation, the FAA said. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on social media X that FAA investigators were en route to Toronto and that he is working with his Canadian counterparts to assist in the investigation.

The accident comes weeks after a fatal midair collision in January at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport, which killed all 64 people on an American Airlines regional jet and another three people on board an Army Black Hawk helicopter.

Separately, the FAA was recently hit by layoffs spearheaded by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, with several hundred air traffic controllers receiving firing notices over the weekend.

A U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson told NBC News the FAA “continues to hire and onboard” air traffic controllers and that the agency has “retained employees” who perform critical safety functions.

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