As a longtime financial advisor, Josh Strange has gotten pretty good at separating hype from reality. Not just about investment opportunities but also new technology that always promises to transform his industry.
So despite the growing buzz around AI, Strange is not ready to pass “GO.”
“You can’t just drop a new tool into the practice and expect magic to happen,” said Strange, Founder and President of Good Life Financial Advisors of NOVA. “We’ve all seen advisors go to a conference, find the shiny new piece of technology that’s going to change everything and six months later nobody’s using it.”
Strange says AI can be useful depending on how a particular advisor works. For example, AI can automate tasks like note-taking, which can free advisors to focus on other tasks. But experts and industry data say AI has so far fallen short of solving the industry’s more urgent and existential problem: how to jump-start meager organic growth.
“AI is already giving advisors meaningful time back, but we’re learning that efficiency and organic growth are separate problems,” said Rylan Folts, Co-Founder and Head of Sales at WealthFeed. “Efficiency does create capacity. Growth comes from knowing where to direct it. That’s the part of AI’s potential the industry is only beginning to tap.”
As companies continue to pour millions of dollars into AI investments, the gap between rhetoric and real-world application has been widening, especially when it comes to boosting organic growth.
The Organic Growth Problem
There’s little doubt advisors continue to struggle to attract new clients. The median RIA increased assets under management by 14.4% in 2025 but grew its client base by just 2.1%, equivalent to only one net additional reported client, according to Paithos.
Cerulli found that over half of RIA clients are age 50 or older, with 25% at age 60 or older. These clients tend to spend more, which depletes their assets.
Many advisors think AI can help solve this problem. In theory, AI could analyze client and prospect data to identify high-potential prospects, likely life-event triggers and patterns that signal a need for financial advice. It could also uncover opportunities within existing relationships, such as held-away assets, unmet planning needs or clients likely to benefit from additional services.
“Money-in-motion is really about recognizing when something has changed in a person’s financial life that creates a reason for an advisor to start a conversation,” Folts said. “AI can help make those moments easier to identify and give advisors the context to act on them while they’re still relevant.”
In 2026, half of advisors identified AI and automation tools as a top force multiplier for firm growth, according to Orion’s State of the Advisor report.
BCG estimates AI could unlock 25% to 35% of capacity in client acquisition and 20% to 35% in retention and growth, including through prospect discovery and lead scoring, personalized outreach and next-best-action prompts for advisors.
But here’s the problem: The industry broadly remains far from realizing those capabilities at scale.
“Unlocking that capability and delivering its full potential remains elusive,” said Brian Filanowski, CEO of Docupace.
The Data Problem
The big obstacle is not necessarily AI itself but rather the data the technology draws upon. Firms and advisors use a hodgepodge of vendors to collect data, such as CRM, compliance, marketing and prospect lists, and those systems don’t normally talk to each other.
“The technology isn’t the constraint,” Filanowski said. “The data underneath it is. Give AI clean, unified data and it can start to take on real problems.”
“Our industry continues to operate with multiple silos of partial data, often not in sync with each other, and often with no easy way to access them directly,” he continued. “Few firms have a dedicated ‘Data Owner’ whose responsibility it is to provide a single source of truth for the rest of the firm to make use of, yet the work of extracting, cleaning, merging and maintaining data is complex, specialized, and time consuming, and the impacts of getting these tasks wrong can be disastrous. When these tasks are left to financial professionals within the firm, they are either deprioritized or undertaken with varying levels of success.”
Part of the problem may be that the wealth management industry has yet to fully understand how to deploy AI, said Sindhu Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO of CogniCor.
Firms have quickly moved from experimenting with the technology to assuming they need AI agents and other sophisticated applications, even though many have yet to build the underlying infrastructure needed to make those tools effective, she said.
“We went from no understanding of AI to overconfidence in terms of, okay, we understand everything now,” Joseph said. “I think if I don’t roll out an agent experience, I am behind.”
The industry has therefore “shortcut a lot of steps in between” to automate tasks and generate efficiencies, she said, while industry influencers have not done enough to educate firms about how to capture AI’s broader potential.
Building The Intelligence Layer
Instead, Joseph argues RIAs should think about AI adoption as a progression. Firms must first capture information from meetings, emails, forms and other sources, then aggregate that fragmented data into what she calls an “intelligence layer.” From there, AI can generate insights across an advisor’s entire book of business and eventually anticipate opportunities and risks before advisors or clients recognize them.
“This is where … the advisor should really be,” Joseph said.
For example, AI could examine an advisor’s entire practice and identify “a massive windfall for this particular household” or the risk that a client might miss a Medicare enrollment deadline. Such capabilities could allow advisors to shift “from a reactive process to a proactive experience,” she said.
Getting there, however, requires firms to connect AI to enough of their underlying client information to make its recommendations meaningful.
Joseph cautions against allowing an AI application to recommend actions based on only a small portion of a household’s financial picture.
“Every time if I’m doing an automated action, just ask yourself if I’m looking at if I have 20% of the data exposure for this automation or 80% of the data exposure of the data that is needed,” she said.
If the answer is closer to 20%, firms should reconsider the application and give the system access to more of the relevant information, Joseph said.
From Efficiency To Growth
Some firms are making progress in using AI for organic growth.
Cetera, for example, has incorporated AI and data analytics into its Growth360/GrowthLine programs to identify opportunities, generate leads and improve advisor follow-through. Its newer IntelligenceEngine analyzes existing books of business to uncover opportunities to deepen client relationships and increase share of wallet.
Other platforms are attempting to identify prospects based on their digital behavior. For example, in a recently announce partnership, WealthReach identifies people researching financial advice online and passes those prospects to VastAdvisor, which uses those signals to build targeted marketing campaigns.
Those efforts suggest AI is beginning to move beyond simply helping advisors work faster toward identifying and cultivating actual growth opportunities. But such examples remain relatively limited compared with the industry’s broader use of AI for back-office and administrative tasks.
For the most part, advisors have experimented with AI on the back end, automating administrative tasks that can free up time for them to concentrate on clients.
Yet capacity, productivity and efficiency are not the same things as growth.
Joseph argues firms must ultimately decide what they actually want AI to accomplish. The answer should determine how firms build their AI systems rather than adopting individual tools simply because they are the latest technology to hit the market, she said.
“AI can either be a peripheral capability that delivers last-mile capabilities (‘write an email,’ ‘summarize this spreadsheet’),” Filanowski said. “Or a foundational technology that genuinely drives growth.”
The question, then, is no longer whether advisors will use AI. It is whether firms can build the infrastructure and discipline necessary to turn the technology from a tool that merely saves advisors time into one that helps them find new clients and generate organic growth.
Thomas Lee, Senior Editor and Staff Writer at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at thomas.lee@wealthsolutionsreport.com.
