RIAs doubled AI adoption. The payoff is still unproven.

According to a BCG study cited by Financial Planning, only 6% of companies that adopted AI have seen the technology cut costs or lift revenue. The number lands awkwardly for RIAs, where adoption is running well ahead of evidence that the spending pays: Schwab's 2026 RIA Benchmarking shows use among independent advisors has more than doubled since 2023, while the share reporting full strategic integration sits at one in ten. For the rest, the column argues, AI is administrative convenience—note-taking, email drafting, and meeting summaries.

Administrative convenience is not a bad outcome for a business whose product is advisor time, but it is not a P&L outcome. A note-taking tool that saves 45 minutes after each review meeting creates value only if those minutes become another client meeting, another prospecting call, or capacity to serve more households. The column's anecdotes show how easily that conversion fails: one planner told Financial Planning she uses the freed time to prepare more deeply for the next client meeting, a quality gain with no direct effect on AUM; another advisor now stops working at 2 p.m. while his AUM and client satisfaction scores stay stable enough that his firm has not noticed what happened to his afternoons.

Every practice that has bought AI now has to say which hour of an advisor's day the tool purchased and what revenue followed it into the book. That calculation requires a growth discipline attached to adoption: a target for added AUM, a quota for new conversations, a demonstrably larger number of households each advisor can serve. Without that discipline, the AI budget rests on hope—and the evidence base for hope, at least in the BCG data, is 6%.