One of the clearest indicators of where wealth management is headed isn’t found in analyst predictions or technology roadmaps—it’s in the startup market. Where is smart capital flowing? Which companies are attracting investment? What problems are entrepreneurs choosing to solve? The answers reveal an industry well into a new phase of AI-driven innovation.
The wealth management technology ecosystem has expanded dramatically over the past several years, with the Kitces/Iskowitz AdvisorTech landscape growing from fewer than 200 firms in 2018 to more than 500 today. Increasingly, many of the newest entrants are AI-native companies less focused on automating existing workflows than eliminating them and the teams that operate them.
Two different forms of AI innovation and adoption are emerging simultaneously. One is focused on improving the economics of today’s advisory business. The other is focused on reinventing tomorrow’s. Together, they point toward what I believe is the industry’s next chapter: the rise of the Super Advisor.
The first race is already well underway.
Across the industry, advisors are adopting AI to summarize meetings, draft client communications, automate CRM updates, accelerate research, streamline compliance, and improve operational workflows. Hightower is partnering with AI innovators such as Zocks, Dispatch, and Moment to improve our front-office advisor and support processes, custody operations, and portfolio management. These innovations matter because they remove friction from the advisory business. Advisors gain capacity. Firms improve operating leverage. Clients receive faster service and more responsive communication.
Over time, however, these capabilities will become expected rather than exceptional. No firm competes today because it has email, cloud software, or a CRM system. Likewise, AI-powered meeting notes, workflow automation, and research assistants will increasingly become the cost of operating a modern wealth management business. They are essential—but they won’t define long-term competitive advantage.
The more interesting race is just beginning.
Rather than automating existing processes, a growing number of companies are using AI to rethink how wealth management itself is delivered. Instead of building another point solution, they’re creating or leveraging modern AI-native platforms that connect planning, investments, tax strategy, estate planning, lending, compliance, operations, and client engagement into a more integrated advisory experience.
This is where the startup market becomes particularly instructive.
Venture-backed companies are increasingly investing in platforms that cross traditional technology and organizational boundaries rather than reinforcing them. The objective is no longer simply to make advisors more efficient. It’s to expand what advisors are capable of delivering.
Historically, wealth management has divided expertise into specialized domains supported by different professionals, different technologies, and different data. Clients don’t experience their financial lives that way – and increasingly, neither does AI.
AI doesn’t respect the traditional boundaries between planning, investments, taxes, insurance, estate strategy, or lending. Instead, it can synthesize information across those domains, helping advisors recognize opportunities, ask better questions, and coordinate more comprehensive recommendations than was previously practical. Rather than replacing specialists, AI extends an advisor’s reach across multiple disciplines while allowing specialists to continue providing deep expertise when needed.
That’s what creates the Super Advisor. Not an advisor who knows everything, but an advisor who can orchestrate expertise across an increasingly complex financial landscape while remaining the trusted relationship at the center of the client’s financial life.
This shift also changes where advisors themselves create value.
Over the past two decades, portfolio construction, financial planning, tax optimization, and risk management have become increasingly professionalized through sophisticated software and standardized processes that more consistently improve client outcomes.
AI accelerates that trend. As technical expertise becomes more accessible, competitive advantage shifts away from producing analysis and toward interpreting it.
The advisors who create the greatest value will understand client priorities, coach behavior, navigate uncertainty, coordinate increasingly complex financial decisions, and know when human judgment matters more than algorithmic recommendations. AI won’t reduce the importance of advisors. It raises the standard for what great advisors can do.
Another opportunity is emerging alongside the expansion of advice across domains. Historically, wealth management has relied primarily on highly structured financial information such as investment account holdings, transaction data, tax returns, income, and inputs from risk profiling and planning tools. But in our digital lives, clients generate a much richer picture of their financial lives through tax information, held-away assets, banking activity, spending behavior, other client-authorized financial data and even things like personal email.
AI makes it increasingly practical to organize and synthesize that information responsibly, helping advisors identify opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden.
We’re already seeing early examples. At Hightower, our work with TaxStatus reflects a broader movement toward integrating richer client data into advisory workflows—not simply to automate existing processes, but to improve the quality and personalization of financial advice.
Longer term, I believe AI’s greatest contribution won’t be writing emails faster or summarizing meetings more efficiently. It will be helping advisors develop a far more complete understanding of the people they serve.
Technology alone won’t determine who succeeds.
The firms that lead the next generation of wealth management will combine AI with integrated technology, high-quality data, strong governance, and thoughtful compliance frameworks. They’ll treat AI not as another software feature, but as foundational infrastructure for delivering better advice.
The first race – operational AI – will become table stakes. Competitive pressure will ensure that nearly every firm adopts these capabilities because the economics will demand it.
The second race will determine the industry’s future.
The firms that rethink how advice is delivered, how expertise is coordinated, and how client relationships are strengthened through AI will create a different kind of advisory business.
They won’t simply have more productive advisors.
They’ll have advisors capable of delivering broader expertise, deeper insights, more proactive guidance, and a more comprehensive client experience than has ever been possible.
That’s the promise of the Super Advisor.
And I believe it will define the next era of wealth management.
Randy Bullard is the head of investment management at Hightower, where he leads the development of Hightower’s first centralized investment management platform.
The Investment Adviser Association, CFP Board, and the CFA Institute warn semiannual filings would widen information gaps and raise costs for advisors and clients.
Elsewhere, a Commonwealth team in Massachusetts converts to Cetera, while Janney draws four former Wells Fargo advisors to its Radnor, Pennsylvania office.
Clients say he copied the boss on his emails - and now they can't touch their cash.
He wired millions to his own accounts and told investors the fund was winning.
The partnership arrives as most small business owners near retirement age still don't have a formal succession plan in place.
Dan Biagini of American Equity says the steady decline of pensions, longer lifespans and a reset in interest rates are rewriting how advisors build retirement income
Direct indexing is on pace to outgrow ETFs and mutual funds. Northern Trust's Ken Lassner explains why the advisors who get it wish they had started sooner.
