Agentic AI Arrives in Advisor Offices

What if we told you BNY Pershing has dozens of employees it doesn’t pay and who never take a day off? Sounds farfetched, but it’s the truth. 

Speaking at the Future Proof Citywide conference in Miami Beach, BNY Pershing Managing Director Ben Harrison said the firm has deployed 160 “digital employees” powered by agentic AI, each with an employee badge number and performance-assessment framework. They work on a range of administrative and operational tasks well-suited for AI, all overseen by human managers who track their productivity and ensure reliable outputs. 

“We are bringing teams of people together across business development, operations and engineering to build agents to do specific tasks, and then we are putting those tools in the hands of people doing important work for the firm,” Harrison said. “We have more than 41,000 human employees. We encourage everyone to use AI in their work.”

The firm’s enthusiastic but cautious use of AI (agentic and otherwise) is a sign of exciting things to come, Harrison said, but like Carson Group CEO Burt White and Hightower Advisors CEO Larry Restieri, he was quick to emphasize the durability of the human connection in the advisor-client relationship. It was a theme repeated throughout the three-day Citywide conference: agentic AI has huge potential in the wealth management industry, but firm leaders cannot lose sight of its risks and limitations. Ultimately, agentic AI should empower advisors, not replace them. 

More Time for Human Connection 

“What I find most exciting is the conversation around the productivity side of AI,” White said. “AI tools should take repetitive or tedious tasks off the advisor’s plate and create greater opportunity for advisors to spend time on the human side, to maintain the human connection with their clients. AI should give advisors more time and more access to expertise. The payoff should be having more time for humans to connect.” 

Research shows many advisors agree:

• 87% of advisors use or plan to use AI tools in the near future, according to ISS Market Intelligence. 
• 58% of advisors use AI to summarize information, while at least 55% use it to generate written content or support general brainstorming and research.
• 42% employ AI in investment research, and 21% create visual content with AI tools. 

“Agentic AI is arriving in the advisor world, but I don’t think we’ve seen a big change in the advisor-client relationship,” Restieri said. “There have been productivity gains from AI, no question, and we’ll see more of that, but I have trouble seeing agentic AI taking the place of advisors. Even really good AI models don’t have the emotional intelligence and the empathy that human advisors bring.” 

Agentic AI as CRM. One way agentic AI might fundamentally disrupt the client-advisor relationship is by replacing traditional client relationship management platforms, White believes. “Agentic AI will allow us to deliver on the idea of having a truly individualized experience for each client family,” he said. “If you have the right data in place, I personally believe you’re going to be able to use these tools to replace the traditional CRM that offers all clients the same way to engage with you. That’s what we’re building today.”