Agentic AI reshapes how advisors plan their 2027 tech budgets

As advisory firms begin setting technology budgets for 2027, three product and operations leaders in wealth management technology say the clearest returns from agentic AI aren't coming from the advice conversation itself — they're coming from the operational work that surrounds it: meeting prep, client follow-up, and the connective tissue linking a firm's CRM, custodial data, and planning tools.

Where agentic AI is already paying off

Joe McQuaid, chief operating officer at Concurrent Investment Advisors, said the technology's clearest wins sit behind the advisor rather than in the advice itself.

"Agentic AI that can reach into those systems, pull a household's data, draft the review, and route the follow-ups - compresses hours of pre- and post-meeting work into minutes," McQuaid said. "It's also proving valuable in prospecting and pipeline work, where it can research, qualify and personalize outreach at a scale a human can't sustain. The common thread is that value shows up whenever a repeatable, multi-step workflow was previously eating advisor and staff time."

Tom Sullivan, head of product at eMoney, said the industry is still early in adopting genuinely agentic tools and cautioned against equating a single AI feature with a full agentic strategy — a distinction that shapes the "always-on" planning platform his team is building.

"The system continuously understands the client's financial situation, recognizes what has changed and surfaces opportunities when they matter," Sullivan said. "The advisor remains in control of judgment and the client relationship, but the technology does more of the work between those moments. The goal isn't to make the advisor work faster; it's to make the system work smarter."

Conor Curtis, head of product at Practifi, described a similar shift — from tools that wait to be asked a question to ones that flag problems no one raised. "The long-term value of agentic AI will not be measured solely by the hours it saves," Curtis said. "It will be measured by whether advisors can put those hours back into the client relationships that drive retention, referrals, and growth."

Start with the workflow, not the vendor demo

All three executives offered the same advice for firms deciding where to spend: map the workflow before shopping for a tool.

McQuaid said firms should identify "where the handoffs and rework live" and weigh integration as heavily as feature lists, since solutions that "plug into your existing data and systems" outperform ones that force a parallel process. He added that firms should judge vendors on "the operational layer, access, orchestration and governance," calling that the difference between a durable platform and one a firm will outgrow.

Curtis urged firms to document how work actually gets done — how an advisor prepares for a meeting, how follow-ups reach the CRM — before evaluating any product. "An impressive feature can still be a poor investment if it duplicates something the firm already has or introduces another step into the process," he said, adding that license fees are only part of the cost; training, adoption and vendor management add up too. That caution echoes broader survey findings that most advisors say better technology integration is a top strategic priority for the year ahead, even as budgets climb.

Sullivan said firms should ask which capacity-draining tasks — gathering data, preparing for meetings, coordinating across systems — technology can eliminate outright rather than simply speed up. "The best technology isn't necessarily the technology with the most features," he said. "It's the technology that eliminates the most friction between data, planning and action."

The cost of a fragmented stack

Each executive said a disconnected tech stack carries costs well beyond duplicate software licenses. McQuaid called manual reconciliation between systems "a pure drag on capacity and a constant source of errors" that limits how many clients a firm can serve and compounds into redundant vendor spend and weaker data quality over time. A fragmented stack, he said, also can't "layer AI cleanly on top," leaving firms further behind competitors building on integrated infrastructure — a dynamic that is also reshaping how firms train the next generation of advisors as automation absorbs more entry-level analyst work.

Curtis said firms report spending 15 to 20 hours a month reconciling information across systems for compliance reporting alone, a burden that can offset whatever time savings new AI tools were meant to create. "Disconnected systems also introduce risk," he said. "Conflicting growth assumptions, duplicate client records, and incomplete histories can become compliance problems." He pointed to referrals — a major source of new business for many registered investment advisors — as the business that quietly never materializes when advisors are stuck reconciling data instead of building relationships.

Sullivan put it more bluntly: when systems don't talk to each other, "the advisor becomes the integration layer." Stacking more point solutions on top, he said, can make the problem worse if every new tool creates its own silo. The firms that come out ahead, in his view, won't be the ones with the biggest tech stacks, but the ones generating "the most advisor capacity per dollar of technology investment."