The inexorable rise of AI continues, and companies across the financial advice industry are thinking hard about how best to manage the rollout of the disruptive technology.
This week Raymond James CEO Paul Shoukry offered a glimpse into how the independent broker dealer-giant is deploying the technology. Speaking during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Shoukry explained that Raymond James is ramping up the rollout of Rai, the company’s new AI operations agent.
“This agent has been rolled out to a few hundred advisors and their teams so far, in addition to service focus groups at the home office,” he said. “We are very encouraged by the strong initial feedback and will continue to expand advisor and associate access over time.”
Launched in January, the proprietary AI operations agent harnesses natural language processing and generative AI to deliver “curated natural language answers and guidance” to operational questions.
Companies across the financial advisory industry are looking to lock in productivity gains with AI. A recent Morgan Stanley analysis, for example, framed the technology as an aid to operations rather than an existential threat.
However, businesses understand the need for education. “We literally have an AI coach,” Dayna Kleinman, managing director, head of U.S. wealth, at asset manager Sagard, told InvestmentNews. “I would say that we’re leaning in hard.”
During this week’s earnings conference call, Raymond James’ Shoukry also discussed the limitations of AI, and emphasized the importance of the “deeply personal relationships” that advisors have with their clients.
Specifically, Shoukry said that he sleeps better at night knowing that his own financial advisor at Raymond James, if something happened to him, knows his wife and his family and knows what their financial objectives are. “That’s not something I would trust to an AI bot no matter how good the algorithm is,” he added.
Nonetheless, Shoukry believes that the technology can help the advisor/client relationship, helping them come up with more bespoke tailored insights and advice, saving time on administrative tasks, therefore giving them more time to develop personal relationships with their clients.
These sentiments are echoed by Sagard’s Kleinman. “At the end of the day, this [AI] doesn’t replace judgement,” she told InvestmentNews. “[Clients] still want that personal touch.”
However, Kleinman acknowledged the scale of the AI revolution. “We’re at the very beginning of this transformation, this evolution,” she said. “We have to lean into it – to ignore it, you will be left behind.”
Clearly, for the broader financial advisory industry, it’s still relatively early days in the AI revolution. The latest Advisor Wealthtech Survey, released by Orion earlier this year, found that, while about three quarters of advisory firms are using AI in some capacity, just 6% are utilizing agentic workflows and only 5% have implemented cross-system AI integration. However, over half of the respondents said that AI and automation will have the biggest impact on firm success in 2026 and beyond.
For Zach Mangels, senior vice president and financial advisor at Wealthspire, even amid the rise of AI, the close personal relationship with clients is key. The older generation, in particular, want face time with their advisors and value having a sounding board, he told InvestmentNews during a recent interview.
While younger people might be inclined towards a robo advisor, personal contact with an advisor becomes increasingly important as clients get older and their financial needs mature, according to Mangels.
“It's another thing when you're thinking about saving for your retirement, when you're trying to build, when you're trying to build up the funds to buy a house and even figure out what kind of house you can buy, or when you find out you're diagnosed with cancer or some health issue that drastically changes your life and your trajectory,” he said. “That’s when having a financial advisor that you can talk to who knows you, who understands your history and where you were trying to go, that's when it becomes incredibly important and invaluable, and necessary from my perspective.”
Set against this backdrop, he is confident that AI will not replace human advisors, and pointed to the advent of robo advisors some years ago. “I remember there being just concern all throughout the industry, like, is this the end of financial advising? He said. “And it didn't really pan out that way, right? I still have a job, right?”
“In fact, we're looking to bring more advisors into the industry,” he added.
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