Over the past year, financial advisors’ attitudes toward artificial intelligence and generative AI have shifted dramatically, according to a survey released this week by Advisor360°.
Eighty-five percent of advisors said the technology is helpful to their practice, up from 64% last year, and 76% said that they have experienced immediate benefits from generative AI-enabled tools.
Only 8% of advisors surveyed considered gen AI a potential threat to their livelihood, compared with 21% who thought so in 2024. Nine percent of advisors said that they do not use gen AI tools at all.
“Advisors are hungry for Gen AI-enabled tools that can boost their business,” Darren Tedesco, president of Advisor360°, said in a statement. “The rate of Gen AI adoption in the wealth management industry is unprecedented compared to other tech advances over the last several decades.”
Coleman Parkes Research conducted a telephone- and email-based survey in September and October among 300 financial advisors at enterprise wealth management firms across the United States. Participants self-identified as being responsible individually or as part of a team for managing, on average, $2 billion in assets at firms with an average of $103 billion in assets under management.
Gen AI Use in Practice
Wealth management firms that benefit from AI are also setting up guardrails for use, according to the survey. Eighty-two percent of advisors said that their firms have formal policies about generative AI, compared with 47% that did in 2024.
“As with any technology, firms are on the hook to ensure that data privacy and security protocols are in place and enforced when it comes to their AI-enabled tools,” Tedesco said. “This also means paying close attention to AI vendors to ensure their use of data passes regulatory muster.”
Financial advisors said that they mainly use gen AI for predictive analytics, marketing and summarizing meeting notes. Only 29% of respondents reported that they leverage AI-enabled tools to develop personalized financial plans.
Tedesco noted that advisors still prefer to deal with tasks that are core to client service themselves.
“For now,” he said, “using Gen AI to create financial plans appears to be a bridge too far, in part because of compliance concerns.”
The survey found that apart from shifting attitudes toward AI, financial advisors are ambivalent about their tech stacks overall. Sixty-five percent acknowledged that their technology needs improvement.
For the third consecutive year, bad data and a lack of integrated tools dominated the list of advisors’ top technology concerns. Specifically, they are least satisfied with their firms’ current financial planning tools and digital onboarding capabilities.
Advisors also understand the connection between advanced technology and their ability to bring in new business. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that they have signed new clients owing to another advisor’s bad technology.
Meanwhile, 85% of advisors who touted their “state of the art” technology said that they have secured clients because of a competitor’s outdated platform.
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