At Schwab IMPACT 2026 in Boston, James Burton asks Lisa Salvi, head of business consulting and education for Schwab Advisor Services, whether advisors are seeing real efficiencies from AI. She says almost all advisors use it in some form and that note-takers delivered a measurable return in time saved. She also cites Schwab benchmarking data showing that 9% of advisors avoided a hire because of AI productivity gains.
[00:00] 9% of advisors said that they avoided hiring because of actual time savings they've already recognized. Unlike a lot of industries, we got a real ROI of time savings with the note takers.
[00:28] James Burton: Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is James Burton from Investment News. Delighted to be at Impact 2026 here in Boston. Equally delighted to be joined by Lisa Salvi, Head of Business Consulting and Education for Schwab Advisor Services. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:44] Lisa Salvi: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:46] James Burton: Drilling this down to kind of the business level for advisors. What are you seeing? And I'm going to play a bit of devil's advocate here because you probably get asked a lot of very similar questions. But are advisors really seeing efficiencies and value, or is there just a lot of hot air around AI?
[01:03] Lisa Salvi: Yeah, great question. Biggest topic, right? This is where we've been really obsessively focused for more than a year now. And not a day goes by where we don't talk about AI.
[01:16] Almost all advisors are using it in some form at this point in time. They almost universally started with some type of note taker. So lots of them are using that. It was very interesting because unlike a lot of industries, we got a real ROI of time savings with the note takers.
[01:33] That's pretty rare, that you had a measurable ROI. It saved time in writing out the notes and inputting them in the CRM system. A lot of times that saved a client service associate, that junior-level person, from taking on that task.
[01:49] When I look at the benchmarking data, 9% of advisors said that they avoided hiring because of actual time savings they've already recognized from productivity gains from AI they've implemented today. And these are early days. We're in the early innings.
[02:02] We've moved way beyond note takers at this point. Most advisors have kind of centralized around using either a Claude, a Copilot, or a ChatGPT solution somewhere in their tech stack, and then the last quarter's just sort of fragmented.
[02:18] We're now moving into more of an agentic era where we're starting to move from just generating information to more curiosity around actually taking action, even though that action will still be reviewed by a human for the most part.
[02:36] That is very early. We're very cautious. Everybody wants to move to protect trust, of course. This is a trust-based business, but that's where attention is starting to go.
[02:50] James Burton: So that's an interesting topic. That strikes me as quite a potentially dangerous area in good trust and authenticity and that side of the business. So how do you advise that advisors move into that, or whether they should even approach that side of AI?
[03:07] Lisa Salvi: Yeah, it's, like I said, still early days. You need to be very careful. You're not going to start with using client data for the most part, right?
[03:15] You're going to really want to understand what kind of permissions you are starting to give an agent. Is it just the ability to read data? Is it the ability to write data? Is it the ability to delete data? Those are all very different things.
[03:28] You need to understand those guardrails very early. Almost half of advisors are already using AI for marketing content. That might be a safer area to start, and I would really say across the board, human in the loop, right?
[03:41] Always have that human in the loop. It's not acting on its own. It's not going rogue, but it's still early, and I really think a lot of caution is warranted.
[03:50] James Burton: Yeah, interesting. In terms of M&A, that's obviously another huge hot topic. It has been for a long time now. Is AI usage, and I guess effective AI usage, resulting in better valuations for advisor practices? Or is that too easy a shortcut?
[04:08] Lisa Salvi: That's interesting. I don't know that when I talk to people who are very heavily into M&A, I've actually seen that yet.
[04:17] I think having good data, good data hygiene, that's important. I think most firms are looking at some of the traditional value drivers a little bit more, like organic growth, quality of leadership and leadership in G2 and G3 and beyond.
[04:33] Is the geographic footprint of the firm desirable? Do they have a service offering that they want to add into their offering?
[04:42] AI talent, though, is very hard to find. I could see that if you had really high-quality AI talent within your firm that an acquiring firm would be highly interested in that.
[04:52] James Burton: Fantastic. Lisa, I appreciate your insight. Thanks so much for joining us. See you next time on Investment News.
