Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming both a powerful tool and a serious threat for wealth managers - and regulators, scammers and clients are all moving faster than many firms’ compliance frameworks.
That was the clear takeaway from a recent InvestmentNews TV roundtable, “Mastering Compliance,” where three advisory leaders urged peers to treat AI and cyber risks not as edge cases, but as central 2026 compliance issues that must be built into everyday practice.
“We all know what the big buzzword right now is - and it’s AI,” said Jerit Tripp, partner and lead advisor at Gilbert & Cook. “That is probably the biggest compliance risk right now. Not only how it’s being used within firms, but also how bad people can use it to try to penetrate the firm.”
The panel agreed that one of the most alarming developments for advisors is the rapid improvement of AI-powered voice imitation - deepfake audio that can convincingly mimic a client’s speech patterns, tone and even mannerisms.
Jeffrey DeHaan, managing partner of private wealth management at Clearwater Capital Partners, said his firm has already been targeted.
“We have had voice imitation through AI already as an attempt to gain access to client assets,” he said. The only indication of a problem, he explained, was a tiny slip that a human happened to catch. “The only way we knew that this was not our client initially was a very slight mispronunciation of their first name. Otherwise, we even played it for the client and he would have said, ‘I left you that message.’”
For DeHaan, this is no longer a hypothetical risk. “It’s here, it’s coming. If you haven’t seen it, get ready,” he warned.
Tripp argued that this is exactly why advisors and staff must dramatically raise their guard in 2026 and beyond.
“We really have to have our antennas up to say, ‘Is this the person I’m talking to?’ And double check, triple check, and make sure that you’re doing the right things from a compliance standpoint,” he said. That means being skeptical of any instruction - even if it sounds exactly like a long-term client - and backing it up with independent verification, multifactor authentication and documented call-back procedures.
If AI-generated deepfakes are the “front door” attack, careless internal use of AI is the back door, the panelists said.
DeHaan cautioned that the way advisors and staff feed information into AI tools is becoming a core compliance issue in 2026. “How do we protect client data? Make sure that our own people aren’t accidentally putting client or firm information into systems that then become discoverable for other AI answers,” he said.
The risk, he added, is compounded by the fact that many professionals still don’t really understand how AI models work or where the data goes once they paste it into a tool. “We’re so early in the process that people don’t really understand what it is and how it works and what it’s actually giving them,” he said. That’s especially dangerous when advisors start using AI outputs in suitability analyses or as support for recommendations.
As a result, robust AI policies are quickly becoming nonnegotiable elements of the compliance infrastructure:
For James Sahagian, managing director at Steward Partners Global Advisory, the biggest mistake in 2026 is still treating compliance and AI as bolt-ons - things you “do after” client service, rather than core components of it.
“Stop viewing compliance as something separate from client service. The more it’s integrated into the daily workflow, the less burdensome it becomes,” he said. Standardizing how meetings are run, how decisions are documented, and how client communications are archived, he argued, is the only way to keep pace with evolving tools and regulatory expectations.
Sahagian’s team is already using AI-enabled marketing tools - but only through broker-dealer–approved platforms that have been vetted for compliance. He cited their use of Hootsuite, which now offers AI suggestions inside a controlled environment. “It makes it great for us because it’s already through the application that our broker-dealer has given us to use,” he said.
He also stressed that in an era of complex alternatives, structured products and thousands of ETFs, documentation of why a recommendation was made is more important than ever.
“Regulators care far more about the rationale of the recommendation than the recommendation itself, especially with more complex investments,” he said. That places a premium on consistent, AI-assisted but human-validated note-taking and review processes.
All three advisors agreed that no firm should be trying to navigate AI and cyber-compliance risks in isolation in 2026.
Tripp said Gilbert & Cook combines an outsourced chief compliance officer with an internal, cross-departmental compliance team to ensure that emerging risks and rule changes are “cascaded” quickly across the organization. “We are all better when we learn from each other,” he said.
DeHaan urged advisors to think beyond their own firm, too. “We have to have a community around compliance,” he said, pointing to industry discussions around testimonials and endorsements as an example where many firms hesitated until they could see how others were interpreting the rules in practice.
For Sahagian, the bottom line is relational as much as technical: “At the end of the day, we are in a people business. Having a good relationship and communication with your compliance team is very important.”
In other words, in 2026 the biggest compliance edge may not be the newest AI tool, but how effectively firms combine human judgment, shared learning and disciplined processes to harness that technology safely.
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