At the end of November in 2022, ChatGPT went into public release and took the world by storm. Within three years, it had reached 1 billion active monthly users (the fastest pace any tech company had ever reached that level of adoption), and predictions were rampant that the world was on the cusp of mass unemployment as ever-more-capable AI models threatened to displace a growing amount of white-collar workers, or at least to displace a wide range of existing software platforms as an incredible amount of capital was raised to build "AI for ____" across most major software categories and industry verticals.
Amongst financial advisors, the industry found relatively quickly that ChatGPT didn't actually seem to be a direct threat to what are still very human-based advisory relationships of trust. But that didn't slow the interest in creating AI software for advisors, especially as the emergence of AI notetakers quickly became the fastest-growing software category in the history of financial advisors. In turn, the success (in growth and capital-raising) of solutions like Jump and Zocks spurred an advisor-specific wave of new AI-driven startups, from investment research tools like DeepVest and Brightwave, to specialized planning tools from FinDash and WavVest, to Wealth.com, to document extraction like VRGL and Flextract, and prospecting tools like WealthFeed and Finny. The overarching thesis was "disruption" – that new AI-driven solutions would rapidly surpass existing incumbents, leading to rapid disruption across the AdvisorTech Map (and rapid growth to justify often-lofty valuations).
Except the reality is that financial advisors change software very slowly; as Kitces Research on Advisor Technology shows, only about 3% to 5% of advisors report an intent to change software in any particular category in any particular year (driven in part by the fact that clients only tend to leave advisors at 3% to 5% per year, and advisors usually only change platforms at a 2% to 3% switch rate). Which means there's actually remarkably little impetus for any kind of disruption to occur in AdvisorTech, simply because most advisors aren't changing their software platforms fast enough for disruption to happen!
Consequently, at best, a change in software leadership in any AdvisorTech category takes a lot of time. (In point of fact, there were still software platforms in the mid-to-late 2010s "finally" switching from desktop to cloud-based solutions, a future-of-technology trend that had started nearly 15 years earlier!) And at worst, the slow pace of advisor tech changes actually creates risk that the disruptors will themselves be disrupted, as it gives time for incumbents to see what the newcomers are building, and start building their own version of the same features. Which incumbents can potentially gain rapid adoption, because they already have the existing user base and/or enterprises to cross-sell new capabilities to.
Accordingly, it is not surprising that this month there was a slew of announcements from long-standing industry incumbents about their new AI capabilities (to compete against various 'disruptors'). For instance, Salesforce built into its Agentforce for Financial Services a series of new AI tools, including a "Meeting Concierge" (draft summaries of meetings, queue up follow-up tasks, prep briefing for next meeting), "Run My Day" (to help prioritize tasks and highlight at-risk client signals to act upon), and Enhanced Client Details Page (that gives a more AI-commentary style summary of a client integrating all their info together), warding off the competitive capabilities of AI notetakers like Jump and Zocks. RightCapital's new "Iris" AI helps to scan for gaps in client data or spot inconsistencies, identify key planning issues in their projections, and make it easier to "solve" for certain planning scenarios. YCharts' launch of "Y" not only provides AI-driven support for investment analyses (analyze a portfolio to spot key risks, facilitate portfolio comparisons), but can also provide real-time written commentary on what's happening in markets (to brief the advisor, or prepare as a newsletter or communication to clients), and facilitate document extraction (e.g., pulling numbers from statements or spreadsheets to plug into the portfolio analysis or proposal generation tools) akin to VRGL and Flextract.
For advisors, new capabilities like this are appealing, if only because it reduces the number of components in the advisor's tech stack, which both saves money (fewer tools that each often require another $99+/month to buy, as recent AdvisorEconomics data shows technology-per-employee spending has been on the rise in recent years), and reduces the pressure to figure out what integrates with what (native AI capabilities "automatically" integrate with the core incumbent platforms they're built within). To some extent, such expanding AI capabilities from incumbents even reduces the pressure to try new emerging AI tools, when advisors can be reasonably confident "knowing" that their existing platforms will eventually roll out their own versions "soon enough".
For the broader industry, this highlights the reality that AdvisorTech success, and "disruption", is less an engineering conversation (figure out how to make great software that can disrupt the industry), than a distribution/go-to-market conversation (how do you actually get to critical-mass adoption in an environment where relatively few advisors change software in any year?). Simply put, AdvisorTech is a tough market to break into, and incumbents often do have time to replicate features of newcomers, and prevent or at least slow their competitive growth. Accordingly, it's notable that the biggest category of AI growth was the one that largely created its own category – AI notetakers – and didn't have any incumbents to compete against. Yet even there, the CRMs are now starting to strike back as Wealthbox and now Salesforce build their own AI notetaking capabilities… which may not fully stop the momentum of Jump and Zocks, but at the least doesn't bode well for the other 10-20+ providers trying to compete in that category as well?
Ultimately, though, the real question will be whether the incumbents can actually build AI capabilities as good as (or at least "good enough" to compete with) the standalone AI solutions? In practice, it may depend on the category, as some are easier for incumbents to replicate than others. Yet at the same time, startups that do get enough momentum have the opportunity to compete against the incumbents on their own ground (e.g., will Jump/Zocks build their own CRMs to try to take market share from Wealthbox and Redtail?). And in some cases, it may simply be that an incumbent-competing feature set that also has AI capabilities becomes the competitor (e.g., Slant as the "AI-native CRM"). But the bottom line is that AdvisorTech is really not so disruption-prone, it's much more evolutionary than revolutionary. As the saying goes, we overestimate the amount of change that will come in two years… yet beware complacency indefinitely, as the saying also notes that we tend to underestimate the amount of change that can still occur in 10 years?
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-july2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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