New Wealthbox offering sounds alarm bells for competitors

Over the last two years, AI meeting note tools have gone from being essentially nonexistent as a software category to the fastest-growing category on the Kitces AdvisorTechMap. According to the most recent Kitces Research on the Financial Planning Process, about 18% of financial advisory teams have adopted AI meeting note tools so far, and they've broadly divided along two paths in doing so. 

According to the research, just over half of advisors who use AI meeting note tools use so-called 'generic' (i.e., not advisor-specific) tools such as Fathom, Fireflies, or Zoom's built-in AI Companion, which provide a meeting summary and transcription but aren't trained specifically on advisor conversations and don't integrate with other advisor-specific technology. The other not-quite-half of advisors have adopted "advisor-specific" AI meeting note tools like Jump, Zocks, Finmate.ai, and a host of others: In addition to the core meeting transcription and summarization functionality, they also include integration with the advisor's CRM to automatically log the meeting notes in the client's file (and often to prompt follow-up tasks for the advisory team), as well as the ability to draft a post-meeting summary email for the advisor to edit as needed and send to the client. And perhaps most significantly, most advisor-specific AI notetakers are designed to identify and highlight the main points that a financial advisor would want to come out of a client meeting – e.g., specific financial information, goals, plans, and next steps for the client and advisory team to take. 

The breakdown of AI meeting note tools along these two lines demonstrates that advisors are of differing minds about how these tools fit in their tech stack. The 'generic' solution users may be happy to use a tool like Zoom AI Companion that's already bundled into their pro Zoom account (with its sheer built-in convenience leading it to become the #1 most-adopted AI notetaking solution by financial advisors), or one like Fathom or Fireflies that can be used for free or at minimal cost, but don't feel the need to pay $100+ per user per month (the typical cost of most advisor-specific AI notetakers) for a standalone solution made specifically for advisors. The "advisor-specific" solution users, on the other hand, would rather use the tool that works best for their specific use case (i.e., that's trained to know what information the advisor would want to capture from a client meeting, and that integrates with the advisor's existing technology), even if it's more expensive than the generic options. And notably, thus far the industry-specific solutions, with their additional integrations to the rest of the AdvisorTech stack, are out-scoring the generic providers in advisor satisfaction, as well. 

And so glaring question as of late has been: When will existing AdvisorTech providers start to build or acquire AI notetakers to bundle into their own solutions, offering advisors the same depth of integrated capabilities that are driving advisor satisfaction, but without the need to purchase a separate standalone solution (that, ironically, is often more expensive 'just' to get AI-summarized notes into the CRM system than it is to buy the CRM system itself!)? After all, if Zoom has captured the highest overall market share so far simply by already being embedded within its users' existing software, wouldn't it follow that an AdvisorTech solution (most likely a CRM, given the closeness of integration needed to log notes, edit data, and kick off tasks) could capture much of the market share for advisor-specific AI notetakers by doing the same? 

We may have an answer to those questions soon, because Wealthbox, one of the "big three" CRM providers for financial advisors (along with Redtail and Salesforce), has announced its plan to roll out a new AI meeting assistant this summer as an add-on to its core CRM product. Although there aren't yet many details about specific features or pricing, the main selling point seems to be that the new AI notetaker (currently dubbed "Project Althea") will be able to function seamlessly alongside and within Wealthbox, and as the company puts it in its announcement, "infuse AI throughout the Wealthbox application". 

At first glance, Wealthbox's announcement has major implications for the other AI meeting note providers on the Kitces AdvisorTech Map. As one of the first non-standalone, advisor-specific tools (alongside Advisor360, which recently announced its own acquisition of Parrot AI's notetaker that it intends to integrate into its own platform), Wealthbox's AI notetaker would effectively have the same incumbent advantage for users of Wealthbox CRM that Zoom's AI Companion currently has for users of its meeting software: Advisors will be more likely to use a tool that's built into the software they're using already than to go out and shop for a third-party solution. Which in turn means fewer Wealthbox users choosing Jump, Zocks, or other standalone options when they decide to adopt AI notetaking (or to upgrade to an advisor-specific solution from one of the generic tools). 

At the same time, if Wealthbox wants to gain significant market share in the competitive AI notetaker market, it still needs to show advisors that its solution works as well or better than the other advisor-specific options. Advisors who are using tools like Jump or Zocks are doing so because they see them as superior options to the less expensive generic tools (and report higher satisfaction accordingly), and they aren't necessarily likely to switch to a more 'convenient' option if it doesn't generate accurate meeting transcriptions or summaries. And it's worth noting that the biggest differentiator for Wealthbox – that it will integrate better with its CRM than the standalone AI notetakers – doesn't seem to have been a significant pain point for users of the standalone solutions so far. So it won't necessarily be the case that current users of advisor-specific AI notetakers will flock to Wealthbox's new solution, even if they're Wealthbox users themselves, if they're already satisfied with how the solutions they're using integrate with Wealthbox already. 

The one thing that could potentially peel existing users away from advisor-specific solutions is if Wealthbox dramatically undercuts them on pricing – which, it must be said, is a possibility given that unlike the start-up standalone tools, Wealthbox has a built-in channel to market and distribute to its tens of thousands of CRM users, allowing for lower client acquisition costs and the ability to accordingly price at a lower rate. And just from a pure behavioral economics perspective, Wealthbox seems unlikely to price an "add-on" AI meeting note solution higher than its core CRM price of $75 per user per month, which is already less than what most of the standalone advisor-specific AI notetakers charge. So it is possible that the standalone AI meeting note providers will see some significant pressure on their pricing, especially if other CRM systems (e.g., Redtail, which parent company Orion has indicated it also has its own AI initiatives underway) also release their own lower-cost built-in AI notetakers. 

Ultimately, it's important to note that with less than 20% of advisors actually using AI meeting note tools, there's a lot of room for growth for both the standalone meeting notes tools and built-in options. But as investment dollars continue to flood into the space – including, in just the last few months, a $20 million funding round for Jump, a $3 million round for Zeplyn, a $2 million round for Mili, and a recently announced $13.8 million round for Zocks – more competition only increases the pressure on each provider to grow fast enough to emerge as one of the (at most) two or three market leaders that most AdvisorTech categories tend to consolidate towards. As long as the entire category continues to grow rapidly in adoption among advisors, it might feel like there's room for everybody in the field – but as the overall growth rate levels off in the long term, the existence of AI meeting note tools that live in the software that advisors already use could cause problems for the standalone providers who need to convince advisors to adopt a separate solution. 

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 the Chief Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning and helping to make financial advisors better and more successful. In addition, he is the Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, the co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, New Planner Recruiting, fpPathfinder, and FA BeanCounters, 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.