To date, most AI use by financial advisors has been confined to back-office functions. That’s poised to change in 2026, when client-facing AI begins to take hold, experts say.
“In 2026, we are going to see AI working directly with clients on their financial and tax plans,” predicted Jay Zigmont, CEO and founder of Childfree Wealth in Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
Other advisors are similarly confident that AI tools will move beyond meeting notes, email cleanup and document summaries. “Up to now, AI has mostly stayed behind the scenes,” said Mike McCulloch, a financial advisor at Hunter Associates in Salem, Ohio. “In 2026, it’ll start taking on the simple client communication that eats up time for advisory teams.”
Zigmont said the next big step after that would be for AI to perform behavioral and life coaching with clients — and eventually brief advisors on what they could do better.
“It is not a large jump from AI transcription of meetings to AI providing feedback to financial planners,” he said. “Once AI starts giving feedback, it can also ‘score’ or monitor planners to prevent errors. While we focus on AI having errors, we really don’t know how many errors human planners make.”
Even if some of those changes remain a few years away, 2026 will likely mark a tipping point for AI in wealthtech, said Bill Harris, CEO and founder of Evergreen Wealth in Miami Beach, Florida.
“Investors will expect their advisors or financial apps to know their entire financial picture, respond instantly and optimize across their entire balance sheet,” he said.
READ MORE: How advisors could use agentic AI to deepen client engagement
On the fintech side, industry maturation will bring both expansion and contraction. Kristen Oziemkowski, chief operating officer at The Mather Group in Chicago, said she expects to see new AI vendors and solutions emerge and others to consolidate or collapse.
“These tools will focus on streamlining back-office workflows, reducing manual administrative work and improving the speed and accuracy of routine tasks,” she said.
Many firms rushed to be first to market in the AI wealthspace in 2025, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to an advantage, said JP Powers, chief investment officer at RWA Wealth Partners in Boston. Latecomers may benefit from watching competitors, particularly when it comes to how to build more complete and compliant offerings. “For instance, the importance of security and compliance with the latest standards is likely easier built from the ground up rather than tacked on to an existing system,” he said.
From compliance and cybersecurity to data strategy and personalization, industry leaders see AI writ large all over 2026. Scroll down to see what 10 of them identify as the most important trends to watch in the year ahead:
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