Most advisors say AI portfolio construction is worth $500 a month

As artificial intelligence reshapes the investment industry, financial advisors are putting a price on it: $500 a month for a platform that constructs portfolios and makes recommendations, and $250 a month for an AI that only handles research. 

Those findings are from a new survey of more than 200 advisors polled by TacticalMind AI, a startup building an AI investment management tool for advisors. The survey found that 69% of advisors say it's worth $500 per month to access AI that can make investment recommendations and construct portfolios, followed by 16% picking $1,000 a month, 9% for $2,500, and 6% said more than $2,500.

“What we've built is a tool that will tell you what it thinks about your portfolio. It will tell you [for example] out of the six ETFs, it thinks two of them are misplaced, they're in the wrong sectors. It will tell you why it thinks they're wrong or not correct, and then it will tell you the two ETFs it should replace, and why,” TacticalMind AI co-founder Roccy DeFrancesco told InvestmentNews.

DeFrancesco and his TacticalMind AI co-founder Rob Harbin are also the co-founders of OnPointe Software, a financial risk analysis company that launched in 2016. Tactical Mind AI’s proprietary engine ingests more than 50 years of market history, analyzes current events, geopolitical risks, presidential speeches and other market-moving news, and incorporates customized advisor preferences before using large language models to turn those calculations into plain‑English reports and recommendations.

“We know typically six months after certain events happen, the market typically has some repercussions [such as] when inflation and gas prices go up and rates move at the Fed. So it understands this, and it's able to very accurately predict that,” Harbin says of TacticalMind AI. “Based on everything we know about history and what's going on right now, what do we expect the markets to be doing in the next seven days, the next 30 days, 90 days, or 12 months.”

When TacticalMind AI’s survey asked what a high-quality AI research platform is worth, 71% of advisors put the figure at $250 a month, with another 17% valuing it at $500 a month. TacticalMind AI is still finalizing details on its pricing, but they expect tiered monthly subscription options that can vary by firm size, customization needs, and usage.

“What we don't have yet just by nature of the fact that we're a startup and we're launching is thousands of users who have been using it for 10 years to actually prove [our] model,” said Harbin. “But we believe that the AI that we've built and the methodologies we're using are far superior to anything I've seen in the industry.”

Previous research from DeepVest, another startup building AI portfolio analysis tools for advisors, found that general-purpose mainstream AI models produced wrong results on 85% of prompted investment tasks. AI giants are increasingly releasing products marketed as being specifically for financial analysis or advisor support, such as Anthropic's AI agents and Claude plug-ins, Perplexity Finance, or OpenAI’s new personal finance suite for retail investors.

“If you go to the classic trading fall downs where most traders fall short, it's in greed and it's in not following systems. AI is not prone to those things,” said Harbin. “If you tell it not to be, it can adhere to systems and be very true.”

However, both DeFrancesco and Harbin agreed that human financial advisors will remain in demand regardless of AI’s ability to automate investment portfolio decisions.

“I think humans talking to humans about their dreams, their visions, their goals, understanding one another, developing trust in one another is something that people are going to long for more than they realize once they start relying more on tech,” added Harbin.