CRMs have taken on a variety of functions for financial advisors over the years. Beginning as essentially a simple digital Rolodex of client contact information, over time they gradually built in new functions based around that client record. They allowed advisors to write and store notes for client meetings, assign client-related tasks to team members (and organize sequences of tasks into templated workflows to standardize firmwide processes), and pull and push client data via API integrations with other tools like portfolio management systems and financial planning software. And for enterprise advisory firms in particular with many advisors accessing the same pool of client data, the CRM has also become the place where many of the firm's data governance practices are carried out – e.g., keeping audit logs, reporting, and setting and maintaining data retention policies. All of these functionalities helped to establish the CRM's status as the "system of record" for advisory firms; in other words, the authoritative source for a wide range of client data which then flows out to the rest of the advisor's tech stack.
So when AI tools like notetakers and agents began to proliferate in the AdvisorTech space, it seemed only natural that they would end up living inside of CRM systems. After all, data is the lifeblood of AI – not only are AI models trained on mass quantities of data, but their clearest use cases are where the tool can sift through large amounts of information and pull out answers in a fraction of the time that it would take a human – and CRMs are where most advisory firm data lives. Except it took a long time for the incumbent CRM providers to actually start building and releasing AI features. Among the leading advisor-specific CRM providers per our most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology, Wealthbox just launched its inaugural AI notetaker in the fall of 2025 and Redtail hasn't announced any internal AI notetaking or agent features (though Redtail will presumably be integrated with its parent company Orion's recently announced Denali AI platform – which is only particularly useful for Redtail users who also use Orion).
The slowness of the incumbent CRMs to adopt AI created an opening for newer startups to gain a competitive advantage: For instance, AI-native CRMs like Slant have emerged that include AI-powered search, notetakers, and workflows that are fully embedded into the platform (as opposed to being a separate add-on like Wealthbox's notetaker). And even AI notetakers like Jump and Zocks that don't (yet) aim to compete with CRMs directly have in many cases built interfaces that are better for interacting with CRM data better than CRMs themselves, threatening to reduce the CRM's role to a mere database rather than the hub at the center of the advisory firm's operations.
And so it's notable that Wealthbox has (finally) begun to ramp up the release of new AI features within its platform, including this month the announcement of an integrated AI Assistant and AI Agent.
The AI assistant appears to be a standard AI chatbot, where the user can search for data or request actions (e.g., creating a new contact or updating a specific field) via natural language prompts rather than having to navigate to a specific screen or editing window each time an action needs to be taken. The nice thing about this feature is the inclusion of "playbooks", which is essentially a dropdown list of common prompts – for example, when an advisor wants to kick off their new client onboarding workflow for a recently closed prospect, they can click on "New client onboarding" from the dropdown menu and the AI will automatically start the workflow (instead of the advisor needing to actually type the same prompt over and over each time they want to run the workflow).
Meanwhile, Wealthbox's AI Agent is designed to be set up once and then run continuously in the background without re-prompting – for example, a user can set up the agent to deliver a daily list of the most important client touchpoints for that day based on the contact and meeting history for each client.
For Wealthbox, these tools represent a step towards closing the gap between itself and Jump, Zocks, Slant, and other tools that have moved faster in building out their own AI capabilities. But the question going forward will be whether Wealthbox's AI add-ons will truly be competitive with the newer generation of tools that have embedded their own AI capabilities from day one?
What's striking about this month's Wealthbox announcement is how many of the new features are essentially shortcuts or automations of "normal" (non-AI) CRM functions. If an advisor wanted to schedule a daily report of overdue client interactions, or get a notification to send a client an email for their birthday, or kick off an onboarding workflow, it doesn't take an AI agent to set up those automations. Wealthbox's new features might make it easier to execute those actions via a natural language interface, but if that really represents meaningful time savings for Wealthbox users over the old interface, is that really just a commentary on how inefficient that old interface was? Or alternatively, for advisors who had already built out and liked their Wealthbox workflows, is it really necessary to have a new AI agent interface to prompt something that they could (or already did) build as a standard (non-AI) workflow within the existing interface advisor are already familiar and comfortable with?
From the industry perspective, however, Wealthbox's announcement highlights an emerging divide over whether AI tools that work with client data should live within the advisory firm's system of record or whether they should exist on a third-party platform. Wealthbox explicitly makes the argument for the former in its announcement, stating that "An AI layer that can suggest but can't execute within a governed system, that can summarize but can't maintain an audit trail, isn't carrying the weight that advisory firms actually need carried", whereas "When AI operates inside the system of record every action it takes is logged, auditable, and compliant by default." In other words, the firm's data governance policies are hard-coded into its system of record, and any technology running within that system will by definition abide by those policies – whereas if the AI is a third-party tool, there's no assurance it will actually comply with the firm's policies.
Wealthbox's argument makes some amount of sense – to the extent that AI tools execute changes or otherwise manipulate data within the system of record, it's best for them to adhere to the advisory firm's data policies. But the counterargument is that the growth of Jump and Zocks (as well as more specifically agentic AI tools like Vega and CogniCor) over the past few years has shown that many advisory firms don't have the same qualms about third party technologies handling their data compliantly (and in theory, if third-party tech triggers an action in the CRM, the CRM will still have an audit trail of that action and from whence the trigger came?). Because taken to its logical extreme, Wealthbox's argument could theoretically apply to any third-party technology with a two-way integration to Wealthbox – not just AI tools, but client data gathering tools, financial planning software, and portfolio management platforms as well. Is there anything that differentiates AI tools interacting with CRM data externally, from any other software the advisor uses with API integrations to their CRM… other than the AI tools' potential to compete with the CRM's role in the advisor tech stack?
If Wealthbox had rolled out its AI features sooner, before the other tools had time to gain traction, they may have found more success with their argument that AI should live inside the system of record, but we're over three years into the era of AI and creating agents, such that at this point and there is little evidence that advisors are worried about AI agents making "unauthorized" changes to their client data. Perhaps the better argument for Wealthbox's AI is that, for advisors who already use Wealthbox, it's one less third-party tool that they need to buy, and one that's deeply integrated into the tool they already use. Which was really the main case for CRMs to take on AI capabilities all along: Not necessarily because they contain all the firmwide data management controls and policies, but because they contain the data itself and already the platform the advisor logs into in order to interact with that data, and can easily plug into it with AI capabilities that don't require the advisor to buy a third-party solution. But now that third-party solutions have already proliferated, the onus is on CRMs like Wealthbox to give advisory firms a compelling reason to switch to their CRM's own embedded AI capabilities?
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-april2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
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 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.
The broker-dealer giant's newest C-suite hire brings 30 years of enterprise technology leadership, including time at Fidelity, to its expanding AI agenda.
One upbeat line in a proxy filing was all it took.
He warned regulators in 2011 - two years before the scandal hit the headlines.
A new analysis finds Social Security insolvency would trigger automatic benefit cuts nationwide with ripple effects for retirees, local economies and advisers.
Third Delaware ruling on the deal - and Shari Redstone's role is back in frame
As $84 trillion prepares to change hands, advisors who treat estate planning as peripheral are quietly building a sieve, not a book.
In volatile markets, the advisors who win aren't the ones with the best calls - they're the ones whose clients stay the course.
