There's a lot of material that's taught in financial planning undergraduate programs and the CFP educational curriculum, but it's no substitute for the training that real-life, hands-on, client-facing work provides. The problem, however, is that few advisors get the opportunity to receive that training in any structured way. Senior advisors often have little time to sit down with their support advisors and go through the thought processes and judgment calls that go on behind the scenes of the advice they give. Few advisory firms have the resources to put towards dedicated training and education programs. And one of the most effective ways for newer advisors to see the inner workings of the financial planning process – by sitting in to take notes for the senior advisor during client meetings – is rapidly eroding with the advent of more efficient AI notetaking software.
This is a particular issue in an age of advisory firm consolidation, where more and more advisors and assets are concentrated under a single mega-RIA that is responsible for supervising the advice given by all of its employees. And the bigger the firm, the higher the odds that one advisor will give incorrect or misguided planning advice that at best costs the firm a client and at worst creates legal or financial liability for the firm and advisor. Traditionally this problem was mainly confined to the wirehouses and regional broker-dealers with thousands of advisors on their payroll, which dealt with it by severely limiting the types of "advice" their representatives could give (to put it bluntly, setting their policies based on what their single least competent advisor might do that would get them sued and dragging all the rest of their brokers down to the lowest common denominator). But that approach isn't an option in the RIA channel – even with the mega-RIAs – because most of these firms center their value proposition around the depth of planning advice their advisors deliver to their clients… in other words, their value proposition sets the bar too high to simply try to protect themselves by setting the compliance bar low, which makes actual training an imperative.
That's why it's notable to see the news this month about the launch of Wealthstream, a new "advice intelligence" platform for wealth management firms. It has a unique value proposition of helping to analyze a client's situation and serving up financial planning recommendations based on client data – not, as it says, on the basis of efficiency or to replace the advisor altogether, but to introduce planning expertise to less experienced advisors so those advisors can build familiarity with the firm's planning processes and philosophy. To put it more plainly, Wealthstream sees itself as a hands-on training tool for advisory firms to bring their advisors quickly up to speed on how the firm "does" financial planning by highlighting the specific strategies that an advisor might recommend for a given client scenario (in a manner that also ensures the advisor crafts those recommendations consistent with the firm's views about what an appropriate recommendation would have been in such client situations).
What's interesting is that there have been many versions of AI planning tools to come out in the last year that do some version of what WealthStream does (i.e., generate recommendations based on client inputs), but WealthStream is the only one so far to position theirs as specifically an advisor training tool. But in an environment where the cost of hiring advisors rises significantly with even a little bit of experience – e.g., according to CFP Board's 2025 Compensation Study, the median compensation for an advisor with less than 5 years of experience was $107,500, which rises to over $148,000 for advisors with 5-10 years of experience – it starts to make sense how firms might see the value in a tool that can theoretically help them train less experienced advisors to think and plan like more experienced advisors (while reinforcing the firm's own policies and philosophy) without having to pay the elevated market rates to hire a more experienced CFP professional that was already trained by another firm instead.
The question, though, is how much a tool like WealthStream can really train newer advisors to think and act like senior advisors. To be sure, a part of the job is recognizing patterns among client situations that might map to certain planning recommendations, and reinforcement from Wealthstream's AI might help advisors pick up on those patterns more quickly. But arguably a bigger part of the job – and the skill with the widest gap between newer and more experienced advisors – is the ability to listen, ask questions, and fully understand what really matters to the client. An AI tool might be able to serve up several possible recommendations that might each be appropriate for a client in some ways, but confidently deciding on which option to recommend, and figuring out how to deliver that recommendation effectively to the client themselves, requires truly knowing what the client wants to achieve and how to engage in the conversations that occur beyond the software.
And so if an advisory firm wants to go all-in on using AI for advisor training, WealthStream's planning strategy-focused tools might provide part of, but not all of the solution. There are other AI training tools like Shaping Wealth's Lydia conversational agents that can help advisors role-play conversations and practice listening and interviewing skills to expand the "delivery" component of the advice training process. There's also the client meeting scores embedded in AI notetaking tools like Jump and Zocks that give feedback on metrics like how much time the advisor spent talking during the meeting (versus letting the client talk) and how much empathy the advisor displayed. Which means at least at this point, any one AI tool – or even some combinations of them – are still just a part of a complete training program, not necessarily the whole thing.
In the end, then, for enterprise advisory firms that want to bring on more newer advisors, a tool like WealthStream can go part of the way towards getting up to speed on planning strategy (with the additional benefit for the firm that it nudges advisors towards certain firm-approved recommendations, reducing the odds that an advisor will go too far outside the box with their advice and end up creating a liability for the firm). But it's likely most effective not for teaching the concepts themselves, but for reinforcing what the advisor has already learned – through experience, informal training or mentorships, or formal advisor training programs – in other words, as a supplement to the training systems that the firm already has in place, not as a replacement for them.
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.
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