At a glance
- Concurrent COO Joe McQuaid pointed firms to repeatable, rules-based work already mapped to a process: meeting follow-ups, portfolio surveillance, account-opening paperwork and compliance pre-review.
- The checklist gives a principal a concrete next step: pick one onboarding or follow-up workflow and document its owner and approval points.
- Eighty-two percent of 201 U.S. advisors in a May 2026 Morning Consult and Edward Jones survey said they already use AI.
Advisory firms should move from chatbots to agentic AI that runs multistep tasks in the background, executives at Concurrent, Practifi and Vanilla said in an Oct. 28 InvestmentNews report.
Concurrent COO Joe McQuaid pointed firms to repeatable, rules-based work already mapped to a process: meeting follow-ups, portfolio surveillance, account-opening paperwork and compliance pre-review. Practifi head of product Conor Curtis said a firm should define the trigger, owner, completion standard and approval steps before automating, then expand autonomy as execution proves reliable. Vanilla CEO Gene Farrell said firms should aim for proactive AI, and called fully autonomous agents a separate conversation for fiduciaries.
The checklist gives a principal a concrete next step: pick one onboarding or follow-up workflow and document its owner and approval points.
Eighty-two percent of 201 U.S. advisors in a May 2026 Morning Consult and Edward Jones survey said they already use AI. FINRA's 2026 oversight report, released in December 2025, urged firms to define human oversight procedures for AI agents.
Reported by the RIA desk from InvestmentNews. Published . Corrections