Six missing AI capabilities holding financial advisors back

Artificial intelligence tools are projected to radically alter the wealth management industry, with new platforms promising to help advisors expedite administrative work and sharpen investment planning. 

In certain use cases, tools like Jump AI and Motion are already making good on that promise. But the technology still has room for improvement in other applications. To find out where gaps remain, Financial Planning surveyed 250 advisors about the AI capabilities they most want — and still lack — in today’s tools. Here’s what they said.

Advisors consistently expressed a desire for AI to streamline their daily operations, citing the need for intelligent automation to handle routine tasks and improve overall productivity.

Advisors in this group frequently mentioned tasks such as client onboarding, dictation, note-taking and project management organization. Other advisors specifically noted a need for agentic AI.

“[I want] agentic AI that can take complicated client meeting tasks and implement [them] without human oversight,” one advisor said.

Experts say the growing emphasis on agentic AI underscores a key change occurring in how companies view AI tools in the workplace.

“AI is moving away from simple chatbot responses, input-output questions, towards software doing the actual work,” said Jonathan Michael, director of growth at AI financial services platform TIFIN AXIS. “And I think that is the core premise. That’s what everyone is backing. All the billions of dollars are going towards that vision right now.”

As agentic AI becomes more prevalent, Michael said it’s crucial that advisors understand on a basic level what the technology encompasses beyond the buzzwords.

“What is an agent? I hear so many people throwing that word around. What does it mean in terms of actual outcomes for a firm, right? I think that’s why the educational piece is so critical,” Michael said.

Michael, a former AI business fellow at Perplexity, described an agent as “an AI system that has access to tools and can operate in a loop to accomplish a complex task.”

“That’s my definition of an agent. That’s Anthropic’s definition of an agent. I like to go with that,” he said.

Advisors are also eager to see AI advance in portfolio management and analytics. The specific capabilities they want vary from planner to planner, but the common goal is clear: to automate and accelerate what many describe as a “very manual process.”

Some advisors said they would like an AI tool that allows them to do financial planning and analysis through natural language processing, offloading the more time-intensive calculations to an AI model. Others said they want to be able to construct and manage custom portfolios in a more streamlined way through AI.

On a basic level, portfolio automation is nothing new — robo advisors have been around for years — but using AI software on more complex, customized portfolios can introduce greater fiduciary concerns, according to Alison Considine, head of strategy and business development at Betterment Advisor Solutions.

“At Betterment, we obviously have a lot of automation when it comes to portfolio management and the tooling that we offer to advisors, as well as to end clients. But as a fiduciary, we want to be careful about how we roll out AI and tools like that,” Considine said. “So those use cases aren’t quite there for us yet, but it’s interesting to see the advisor demand for it, because I think ultimately that could help shape the tools that are built in this space.”

Even among advisors who are generally happy with their current tech stack, clunky integration between tools remains a major pain point, according to FP’s survey.

“I am so, so tired of a piecemeal approach where I have to manage 20 different two-factor authenticated platforms to accomplish all that I need to do,” one advisor wrote. “A deep integration would bring so much efficiency to my processes. It would be unbelievable.”

The current push toward agentic AI could soon help address that need, Michael said. 

“If you have your custodian integrations, your CRM custodian data, your CRM data, your financial planning data come in nicely into an AI system where you can pull in all the right data flows, run the right workflows within one infrastructure, then you can just keep adding on more,” Michael said. “You can add more and more blocks. … I think that is what’s exciting, right? It frees up a firm to just focus on what they do best, as opposed to, you know, doing hundreds of demos and figuring out what they need and then figuring out how to integrate them.”

Advisors are also seeking more sophisticated AI capabilities to elevate their client relationship management and communication strategies. 

In survey responses, advisors pointed to capabilities like programmatic client communication, automated form processing and natural language navigation within a CRM as AI-powered features they’d like to see in the future.

Advisors also said that they would like an AI tool to help them better understand and manage behavioral changes in their clients.

“It would be nice to have tracking of clients’ behavior when investing, and have them not be able to do certain trades without advisor input,” one advisor said.

“I wish I had a tool that would help me better understand clients’ behavioral changes,” another wrote.

Several advisors said they want AI tools that could cut down the time spent on compliance and regulatory tasks. However, experts note that current solutions still have significant limitations in this area.

“I think we have certainly heard that advisors are using AI to stay current with industry updates. So we found in our survey that AI has even surpassed social media in terms of the way that advisors follow industry trends,” Considine said. “So I think as it relates to understanding regulatory changes or updates in the industry that could impact your business and your client workflows, AI is definitely a really helpful tool for a lot of people today.”

But the next step, which would see AI directly integrate into compliance workflows, is further away, Considine said.

When it came to marketing their firm and prospecting for new clients, advisors weren’t so eager to incorporate AI into their current workflow.

While a handful of advisors said they would like AI tools to help with email outreach and cheaper lead generation, the vast majority of respondents saw more potential for AI in other use cases. Experts like Michael tend to agree.

“I think that AI agents are going to do complex workflows, and marketing is going to go back to old school marketing. I think that people are going to be exhausted by getting cold emails and messages constantly, or seeing ads or whatever,” Michael said. “In-person marketing, seminar marketing, all of that is going to make a comeback, and people are going to crave that in-person meeting. And I think the advisors who are really great at doing that will probably win.”