Practifi has thrown its hat into an increasingly crowded ring, launching an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for wealth management firms, as advisory practices across the industry race to fold artificial intelligence into their daily operations.
The Chicago-based CRM provider has unveiled Practifi Sentir, describing it as the first in a "new category" of CRM where intelligence is embedded into the system's architecture rather than layered on top of an existing platform.
The launch comes with a rebrand of Practifi's original product, now called Practifi Naya, which will continue to be sold to firms that prefer a configurable but non-agentic CRM.
Among other capabilities, Sentir is built around 16 named AI agents that work across every client record and interaction inside the CRM, generating daily briefings, drafting meeting notes to a firm's own template, and answering plain-language questions about a household's history or a portfolio-wide trend. The system also includes a permissioned MCP server, allowing the same client context to extend into other AI tools advisors already use.
Read more: The rise of the super advisor: How AI is redefining competitive advantage in wealth management
Adrian Johnstone, chief executive of Practifi, framed the launch as an attempt to subvert the traditional relationship between advisors and their CRM systems.
"For decades, CRMs have been perceived as takers. A system where advisors need to input and constantly update information," Johnstone said. "With Sentir ingrained in operations, client service, and account management, advisors can view their CRM as a giver."
Conor Curtis, Practifi's head of product, said the system draws on more than 200 primary sources spanning industry guidance, academic research and legislation, an effort meant to ground the agents' output rather than leave advisors relying on generalized, unverified answers.
"Advisors have spent decades learning to speak computer just to get what they need out of a CRM," Curtis said. "We wanted to flip that dynamic....The system does the orienting, giving the advisor information rather than consuming information the way CRMs do today."
Practifi's launch lands in the middle of what's turning out to be one of the most blistering streaks of competetion in years for the wealth technology space.
In June, Salesforce, whose Financial Services Cloud remains among the more widely used CRM platforms in the advisory space, rolled out its own agentic AI suite in June. In the announcement launching its in-platform agents, Salesforce contrasted its approach against other tools that work "completely detached from [firms'] core system of record."
That same month in Nashville, Advisor CRM rolled out a branded AI onboarding tool built to close the gap between winning a new client and actually collecting their paperwork, while Chicago-founded startup FinTurk emerged from beta earlier this year with an $8 billion RIA as its first enterprise customer.
Read more: ‘AI-native’ CRMs are proliferating
The rush toward AI-enabled CRM tools tracks closely with what advisors themselves are prioritizing. In Schwab's 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study, 83% of firms with $250 million or more in assets under management said they are using some form of AI, with administrative tasks, drafting client correspondence and generating marketing content ranking as the most common applications.
The same study found that firms increasingly see a strategic advantage from their CRM as the operational heart of the practice: 56% of firms with more than $250 million in assets now have standardized workflows within their CRM covering more than half of their tasks, up from 50% in 2022, while top-performing firms put that figure at 67%.
Schwab's survey also found nearly all firms using tech systems (98%) saw the greatest impact or ROI from their CRM, matching the impact firms felt from portfolio management systems and exceeding the ROI they reported from financial planning software.
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