Artificial intelligence has wedged itself firmly into the co-pilot seat for many advisors using the rapidly advancing technology. But is that enough in a wealth management industry that’s increasingly focused on financial planning and approaching a tsunami of retirements?

“A lot of advisors are using AI, but it’s for administrative tasks like transcribing meetings, grabbing notes, working on client emails and presentations,” said Lou Maiuri, group CEO of wealthtech and TAMP firm AssetMark. “They’re good use cases, but they’re low-hanging fruit.”

A recent survey from AssetMark found that a third of firms have growth targets over the next year that are significantly higher than their historical trendlines. At the same time, 40% of firms cite managing technology as their biggest challenge. Maiuri said the next phase of AI integration will involve advisors using the tools to handle tasks such as proposal generation, data security, financial planning and tax optimization. In the second quarter, AssetMark plans to launch its Talk Tracks tool, an AI program that can quickly analyze portfolios and financial plans to see how they’re being impacted by current market conditions and create talking points for advisors during client meetings.

“Advisors are building complicated and customized portfolios, which is great for clients, but complex for advisors,” he told Advisor Upside. “If a client calls them up tomorrow, given the market volatility, and asks, ‘Hey, how’s my portfolio doing?’ that’s 30 minutes of prep time per client.” Advisor Upside caught up with Maiuri to discuss how AI is changing the wealth management industry beyond the tech’s latest iteration on the dictaphone.

AU: Financial planning is increasingly central to the advisor value proposition. How does AI fit into that?

LM: The human element to all of this still matters. You can tell an AI agent to produce a plan, but you have to talk to clients. ‘How do you think about your grandkids? How do you think about philanthropy? How do you think about your kids who are getting married and protecting assets?’ AI can certainly help there, but the human edge is still required.

The next set of things in productivity are what I call client nudges. If you have a lot of clients and families, you think about the to-do list everyday. ‘Hey, you haven’t talked to Jen in about two weeks.’ Or if a portfolio has achieved something, and it’s time to take something off the table, you can build all those nudges. You can get a sense of how we can make those tasks more productive by having AI in the workflow, reminding advisors of what they may not see in the portfolio.

Your survey found that hiring staff is also a top pain point for advisors. Why is that?

There’s a couple of things going on. Roughly 100,000 advisors will retire in the next five to seven years, and there are more advisors over the age of 70 than under 30, so we just don’t have enough people coming in as CFPs or junior advisors to help grow. We do some things at universities to bring younger students into the industry, but we can’t solve the problem at AssetMark. But if we can provide those hours back, so advisors can take on more with what they have, that’s a way we can deal with personalization at scale.

The business has also gotten far more complicated. You’re dealing with complicated portfolios, public and private assets, tax optimization, estate planning, life events. When you add all that up, there’s just a lot that advisors have to understand, and there’s just not enough people filling in.

If you’ve looked at what happened with health care, you could argue the ‘care’ is out of healthcare. Doctors in our country — I don’t want to make a big statement — have to see so many patients so quickly, in order to make the economics work. So there’s not a lot of personalized care. We run the risk that that could happen in our industry if we don’t find a way to give back that capability for advisors to deal with that care side. They should be focusing on the life events. I say to our advisors, ‘Focus on your clients’ life plan, and build them a wealth plan to go with it.’ That’s the value advisors bring to clients, and we’re going to bring them the tools to do that.

If the industry doesn’t deliver personalization at scale and firms want to grow, then guess what? Advisors aren’t going to spend an hour with you and me. They’re going to spend 30 minutes, and then it’ll be down to 20 minutes and then 15.

What’s something more people should be talking about?

With things like portfolio construction, maybe trading, there are aspects in the workflows that are rules-based: If this happens, then this happens. You can see AI tools handling more of that down the road. If you have the clients over here, and custody and clearing over there, there’s a lot that happens in the middle ground, and the further you get away from the client, the more you can automate.

The worry is ‘What does this mean for jobs in the industry?’ and that’s the scary side of all this. We could sit back and say there’s been technology shifts since sailing ships went across the Atlantic, and steamships started to disrupt that business. We can find all these analogues, but this is different. This isn’t in a segment; this is broad. This isn’t the shipping industry, or the automobile business or the medical field. It covers the waterfront of everything.

What I’ve said to our teams and advisors is that you need to be in it and experimenting, so you can find how to build an edge and a differentiation for your business. If you’re sitting on the sidelines, then you’re going to be in trouble.

Do we really need FINRA?

That was the question lawyers, industry stakeholders and federal representatives were asking last week during a House Subcommittee on Capital Markets hearing about the role of self-regulatory organizations. Members of Congress are considering related proposals including the Restoring Accountability in Market Supervision Act, which would transfer the rulemaking, examination and enforcement powers of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a self-regulating industry body, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, greatly curbing FINRA’s influence or possibly even eliminating it.

“When investors sign up for investor retirement savings with a financial advisor, they’re forced into FINRA’s industry-run private justice system,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), who introduced the bill last April, said during the meeting. The proposal was referred to the House Financial Services Committee and has seen little action since. McClain added that she disagrees with FINRA’s latest proposals to change its arbitration rules, arguing that it could roll back “investor protections to the 1980s, to a time before the financial crisis, the dotcom bust, or even Black Monday.”

The bigger question may be: Would the SEC be ready? Some policymakers believe bringing those responsibilities under one roof could streamline regulation and reduce duplication, said Jon Glass, partner in the financial crimes advisory practice at professional services firm SolomonEdwards. “At the same time, FINRA conducts thousands of examinations each year and is funded largely through industry fees rather than congressional appropriations,” he said. Moving those responsibilities into the SEC would raise practical questions about resources, capacity and how to maintain the specialized expertise that currently exists, he added.

The Grindstone

Axing FINRA is part of the GOP’s Project 2025, a manifesto of conservative agendas outlined by lobbying group The Heritage Foundation. The think tank calls FINRA “ineffective, costly, opaque, and largely impervious to reform.” While that may sound harsh, many in the industry share similar frustrations, said Larry Shumbres, CEO of wealthtech firm Archive Intel. “What I’ve heard from advisors, broker-dealers and asset managers, is that they would all prefer reporting directly through the SEC than FINRA,” he told Advisor Upside. “There’s less rules and regulations at the SEC level than there is at FINRA, so I think it would be a great thing for the whole industry,” he said.

• Last year, FINRA received roughly 2,600 new arbitration cases filed by claimants — slightly more than in 2024 — and it closed almost as many, per FINRA data.
• Meanwhile, the SEC brought roughly 90 enforcement actions to advisors and their representatives in fiscal year 2025, down from 130 actions the year prior, according to law firm Sidley.

Can You Handle It? Even with SEC Chair Paul Atkins’ era of deregulation, there’s still the concern that the agency may not have the bandwidth to properly oversee the broker-dealer space, especially given that hundreds of employees left the agency last year. “If they’re not able to go out and enforce, that’s a huge drawback for the everyday investor,” Shumbres said.

Brains can only remember so much. Artificial intelligence could change that.

AI can help the brain do less work, but how much less? Matthew Halloran of Zocks and Joshua Herring of the Longevity Science Foundation took to the stage at the Future Proof Conference in Miami Beach, Florida, this week to discuss how advisors can use AI, and not the other way around. Since AI uptake has skyrocketed, advisors who don’t implement it into their practice risk falling behind and shouldn’t fear outsourcing their thinking to the new technology. In fact, not doing so, say, not recording client meetings, may cause important details to slip through the cracks.

“My brain doesn’t retain as much stuff as it used to,” Halloran said. “I was a therapist before I got into this industry, and when you write things down, you miss stuff. [AI] allows you to not miss stuff.”

Impart(AI)l Observer

The primary benefit of using AI in client meetings is that it’s an unbiased recorder, which can mean it keeps track of information an advisor might block from their memory, Halloran said. If a client says something that’s triggering for an advisor, they may forget what was said afterwards, he added. “When you have a really great AI tool in the background, it is listening without prejudice,” he said. The danger stems from offloading important decisions; critical thinking should never be automated, Herring said. This can be mitigated by taking notes at the same time as the AI. “What the data suggests is that the best thing you can do, and this is a bit of a contradiction, is actually take those notes and have an AI notetaker take notes alongside you,” Herring said. This is because a person will notice things — inflections, body language, enthusiasm — that a robot never can, and the advisor should know what’s most important to their client without them having to necessarily say it outright.

But although AI notetaking in financial planning meetings is on the rise, it’s far from universal. According to a recent Kitces report:

• Less than 20% of advisors actually reported using AI notetaking tools.
• Advisors who do use notetakers are split roughly in half: those who use generic, non-advisor-specific tools (like Zoom’s built-in option), and those who use tech meant for financial professionals, like Jump or FinMate AI.

Tedium. The way to tell the difference between what should and shouldn’t be offloaded is in how tedious the work is, Halloran said. This can be particularly relevant if, say, the advisor has to enter the same bit of data in several different places. “The probability of mistakes is exponentially higher, where if you’re outsourcing that to something that is actually built for that … I just think that effort is a really good thing,” Halloran said.