63% of RIAs use AI; one in ten has fully integrated it into strategy

Sixty-three percent of RIAs now use AI, double the 2024 share, and one in ten has fully integrated it into its business strategy, Ashley Longabaugh said at RIA Edge Orange County, citing survey data. Longabaugh, global head of wealth management at the technology consultancy Celent, moderated the panel at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach in Dana Point, Calif.

The first records a purchase. The second records a change in how the firm operates. On Longabaugh’s numbers, nine in ten RIAs have bought the software without fully reorganizing around it.

Longabaugh framed the missing piece as a question of ownership. “Who is owning the AI, who is building that trust and the governance around it?” she asked the room. As AI begins to take action rather than just give answers, she said, the operating model matters just as much as the technology.

A firm tested a service chatbot that was not connected to its CRM or the service environment it already ran, and advisors kept taking their questions to human colleagues instead. Tim Foley, head of product and AI at the wealth management platform AdvisorEngine, described the project and its result: inefficiency rather than streamlining. “In the heat of the moment, if they had a question, they were going to a trusted human chat to get answers rather than to the AI chat,” he said.

Kimberley Raimondo, co-founder and CEO of Brookwood Investment Group, a $1.5 billion RIA, made the operator’s version of the same argument. “A lot of times we begin with technology in mind, but instead we have to begin with the operational model in mind,” she said. Firms should start with the advisor and client experience they want and work backward, she added; without that, “you’re just picking technology that’s disparate.”

Most of what RIAs do with AI today is assistive: notetaking, client onboarding and research, where a person reads the output before it goes anywhere. The panel’s concern is the next step, as agents become more widely available across customer relationship management, investment management and coaching. An agent that acts inside the CRM or the portfolio has no reader checking it first, and a firm with no owner for that agent is running a process nobody has agreed to answer for.

The practical question for an RIA fits in a meeting agenda: when an agent drafts a recommendation or edits a client record, who signs off, and what does that person see? On Longabaugh’s numbers, most firms have the subscription and not the answer.