NewEdge Capital Group, LLC has reported rapid, advisor-driven adoption of Claude, Anthropic's artificial intelligence platform.
The news comes just weeks after NewEdge granted firmwide access to advisors and staff across its two registered investment advisor businesses in New York.
The firm operates NewEdge Advisors, a growth-oriented RIA supporting entrepreneurial financial advisors nationwide, and NewEdge Wealth, an RIA focused on ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, and institutional clients.
Advisors across both businesses have moved quickly beyond basic experimentation, building and deploying custom tools that are already changing how they prepare for and conduct client meetings.
James Jesse, chief executive of NewEdge Capital Group, said the firm's collaboration with Anthropic was built on the premise that AI's impact had to be felt across every advisor, not siloed in select workflows.
"The power of AI can't be limited to individual cases or point solutions if we expect it to revolutionize the way we serve clients, grow our firm and shape the future of our industry," Jesse said.
What stands out in NewEdge's early rollout is not the technology itself but who is driving it.
Advisors, rather than the firm's corporate team, have been the primary architects of practical use cases and Alex Goss, co-founder and chief executive of NewEdge Advisors, said the pace of adoption exceeded internal projections.
"We built the framework and gave advisors the access, and they've taken it further, faster, than we could have built for them," Goss said. "That's the real story here - not that we gave them the tool, but what they've already accomplished with it."
The use cases emerging across the network span the full arc of advisor workflows.
Advisors are using Claude to distill lengthy financial plans and meeting notes into concise briefings in minutes rather than hours, to build retirement roadmaps that structure planning conversations more visually, and to translate dense insurance and annuity contract language into plain-English explanations suitable for direct client use.
The time required to build a client webinar has been compressed from hours to minutes, and client-facing materials are being reviewed and refreshed through the platform; a sign that adoption is spreading laterally across practices, not just filtering down from headquarters.
Those gains align with a broader pattern documented across the industry.
A Spring 2026 InspereX Pulse Survey of 783 financial advisors found that 70 percent of advisors now actively use at least one AI tool in their practice, with the top efficiency gains reported in research and insights (74 percent), client communication and follow-up (73 percent), and meeting preparation and documentation (72 percent).
Critically, 78 percent of respondents said advisors who fail to adopt AI in the next three to five years will face a competitive disadvantage.
NewEdge is not alone in moving on Anthropic specifically. LPL Financial and Orion recently announced their own integrations of Claude, making the technology available across a network of more than 30,000 advisors.
Peter Nolan, Anthropic's head of asset and wealth management, described the firm's goal as giving RIAs and broker-dealers "a foundation to build their own private plugins customized to their advisors" which is the same model NewEdge appears to be executing on, with advisors themselves doing much of the building.
With McKinsey projecting a shortage of roughly 100,000 advisors in US wealth management by 2034, the efficiency argument carries real urgency.
But the question of whether AI ultimately displaces or empowers the advisor is one the industry has been wrestling with openly.
At LPL's Focus 2026 conference in San Diego in August, attended by more than 6,000 industry professionals, chief executive Rich Steinmeier addressed it directly. "Will AI replace the advisor? Quite simply, no," Steinmeier said, while announcing a nearly $2 billion, three-year technology investment that included Cyan, an AI agent embedded directly into LPL's advisor operating system.
NewEdge says it is continuing to invest in advisor enablement, including a growing library of Claude best-practices resources, a webinar series spotlighting additional use cases, and peer-to-peer forums where advisors can exchange ideas on how they are using the platform.
Eleanor Dorfman, head of commercial sales and private equity at Anthropic, said the firm's rollout illustrates a model the broader industry will be watching.
"From meeting briefs to financial plans and retirement roadmaps to translating annuity contract language, their team is using Claude so advisors can spend more of their time with clients," Dorfman said. "We're excited to keep building on our work with NewEdge as they set the pace for AI-native wealth management."
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