SEI and Destiny Wealth Partners have put dedicated leadership behind their artificial intelligence ambitions, reflecting how seriously firms are taking the technology's potential to transform advisory work.
SEI, the Pennsylvania-based financial technology and asset management group with roughly $1.9 trillion in AUM/AUA announced a trio of appointments that together span strategy, execution, and data.
Sneha Shah takes on the newly created role of Chief AI Strategist, while Michael Tryniszewski joins as Head of AI Orchestration and William Coffey becomes Chief Data Officer. The structure is deliberate: Shah sets the direction, Tryniszewski operationalizes it across business lines, and Coffey builds the data infrastructure the whole effort depends on.
"AI is no longer optional for financial services firms; it's a strategic accelerant that requires clarity, accountability, and long-term vision," said SEI CEO Ryan Hicke. "Sneha has been instrumental in shaping SEI's AI journey, embedding it into how we operate and evolve the business while ensuring our approach is grounded in responsible use, strong governance, and real business impact."
Shah, who has spent more than 25 years across roles at London Stock Exchange Group, Refinitiv, and Thomson Reuters, joined SEI in 2023 and has since built out SEI Next, the firm's innovation and venture-building unit.
Her new brief is to shape enterprise AI strategy, guide build-versus-partner decisions, and translate emerging technology into commercial outcomes.
"AI is evolving faster than any technology shift we have seen, and that demands both intention and adaptability," she said. "At SEI, our focus is on applying AI in ways that enhance human decision-making, strengthen trust, and deliver measurable outcomes. We are disciplined about where we build proprietary capability and where we partner, invest, or acquire for durable advantage."
Separately, Destiny Wealth Partners and Destiny Family Office, the Florida-based independent RIA group, announced that Sean Beierly has come aboard as Head of AI Products and Platform for Destiny Intelligence, a new AI-focused entity formed within the broader Destiny organization.
The unit's purpose is to build AI tools purpose-designed for wealth advisory, tested inside a working practice before being made available to peer firms.
Beierly arrives with close to three decades in technology, most recently on Amazon's AI innovation team, where he designed production AI agents and led global enablement programs targeting complex business workflow automation. Before that, he spent more than 20 years at Cisco Systems moving through engineering, business intelligence, and data science roles.
His mandate at Destiny covers a range of products still under development: advisor digital twins, client intelligence agents, onboarding automation, and what the firm calls the Destiny AI Operating System, described as a practitioner-built framework for advisory businesses adopting agentic AI.
The context matters: Destiny's founder and CEO, Tom Ruggie, argues that a gap has opened up between large firms capable of investing heavily in enterprise AI and the many smaller RIAs and family offices that face cost, compliance, and explainability barriers.
"We recognized early that AI would fundamentally reshape wealth management,” said Ruggie. “We believe Sean's leadership in AI innovation, deep technical expertise and strategic mindset will allow us to build capabilities that place Destiny among the industry's true first movers," he said.
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