Why AI Should Be Advisors' Best Friend in 2026

In a recent interview with ThinkAdvisor, Nash discussed her views on the rapidly changing world of wealth technology and what AI means for the future of advice.

Here are the highlights of our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: How would you define the wealth management industry's biggest technology developments of 2025?

CHERYL NASH: I don't think anybody can get past 2025 without talking about private markets and alternative investments. It's really been the biggest tech development for InvestCloud.

It's about laying the operational foundation to move alternatives out of brokerage accounts and into managed accounts. That's one of the biggest pivots that the industry's making in alternative investments. It's solving the hard problems, which historically have kept private [investments] more siloed. But technology is changing that.

Now advisors can manage public and private assets together in the same portfolio. … So in 2026 we can really start showing the progress of this foundation and where it's going, so it's the year advisors finally normalize alts in client portfolios.

THINKADVISOR: What’s your view on artificial intelligence and its effects on wealth management?

NASH: We're spending a lot of time out in the market talking to our clients about AI and alternatives. What we learned with AI is that you don't necessarily just start with the technology; you start with the friction.

You have to understand where advisors are spending their time. What’s repetitive and can be done through algorithms? Where are the handoffs, the manual work and data gaps? What slows advisors down or their home offices down? And where do clients feel delay or inconsistency?

We're thinking about this holistically for AI — how it could quietly remove obstacles. Advisors don't need to become technologists. AI works in the background. Today, advisors need technology that works for them and is embedded in platforms that they already use, securely and compliantly.

That's where we see AI playing a big role. Next best option is a great example. When you're preparing for client meetings, monitoring portfolios and following up on opportunities, AI can surface those opportunities and help you understand what your next best action is or what clients might need to pay attention to because their portfolios are going against what their asset allocation model says they should be in.

Lastly, I think it also helps a lot with tax and cash management. That's something we're really very focused on. It helps [advisors] understand where there’s about to be a problem, so [they] can be very proactive.

We love AI. It's really not replacing [advisors]. It's really making technology smarter so advisors can have more face-to-face meetings, which is important. Also, advisors don’t have to worry about flagging issues or looking through data points or client portfolios to try to find what they need to look for. It's already flagged for you.

The way that InvestCloud talks about it is that AI is all about intelligent workflows. We're creating this intelligence across the entire workflow, so things get flagged as needed and proactively.

Again, AI won't replace advisors, but advisors who don't leverage AI might be replaced. I’ve never seen a place where there's no need for human connection. But advisors need to really start taking advantage of what's out there from an AI perspective.

THINKADVISOR: What would you say to advisors and other financial professionals who haven’t yet gotten their feet wet with AI? Any tips?

NASH: Be very careful about compliance and regulations. Not every firm allows you to use ChatGPT just because it's OpenAI. But there's a lot of technology out there. We leverage a technology called Glean, which keeps all [the information] inside. It doesn't go out on the Internet. It searches our [data] for answers.

The responses are all inside our walls, so it's secure and safe. It's very focused on us. So when I ask a question, it looks across the Invest Cloud database, and it'll give me more of an InvestCloud answer. There are so many examples of firms that are leveraging [data] that don't put any regulatory issues at play.

That's one of the biggest issues. Once you're out on OpenAI, it's out there. You want to make sure that you're not in that open world and you're more locked down in how your firm actually lets you leverage AI. There are so many good tools.

You can go online and search for ways in which you can educate yourself. But there is so much money being spent across our industry, both on the asset manager and wealth manager sides, that even fintech providers like us are getting great education on what you can and can't do with AI this way.

Some advisors are afraid that it's going to maybe replace something that they do, but it adds value. AI doesn't replace what adds value. It just finds those repetitive things that they can actually surface up to an advisor that makes it easier for them to do their job.

One of the most important things to think about as an advisor is that you're getting data surfaced to you that you would have needed to go and search for yourself. Now, you don't need to do that. It saves time, money and value. It doesn't replace the value of a human.

THINKADVISOR: How are you working with AI at InvestCloud?

NASH: For example, AI can help with testing code. You can have some automated test scripts that AI can actually help you test, so you don't need humans to [go through] the repetitive work of testing.

One of the biggest areas that we found AI can support us in is when you look at the code, and tech writers take that code and write a manual or what's actually in that code. AI can do that faster. It's amazing how much faster it can do it. And AI can also find things in that code that you might need to take a look at. And there are more of what I'd call internal things that AI can do.

Externally, there's ways in which we use AI. We're a shadow database for custodians, so the AI we're leveraging is helping reconcile accounts.

We see issues coming up — like duplicate accounts and data we have that doesn’t match that of the custodian — and we have AI agents that are automatically fixing or flagging this data. That should be one of the bigger areas that can really help our clients leverage our platform more in 2026.

AI is really going to support the operational back-office functions. Not to replace people, but to make their jobs faster and easier. This means they can focus on the things that matter the most.

As I mentioned before, we’re leveraging AI to give advisors insights into client portfolios. We have an intelligent workflow that helps advisors remember when their last meeting was [with a specific client], when they're due for a check-in, etc., — all the things that are not necessarily tasks you need people to do. You can actually do them through AI.

Information, say about a client meeting, goes onto an advisor dashboard and gives the advisor — when they come in in the morning — all the most critical things that they need to look at that day.

THINKADVISOR: What are you planning to be most focused on this year?

NASH: We're seeing that private markets are becoming a reality in retail portfolios. In 2026, there's going to be more focus on technology to make that process better and easier.

There's also a big educational piece that we're working on for alternative investments, so you can educate the advisor and the investor on what is being bought, because it's different from an equity or a mutual fund.

In 2025, we laid the foundation for many things. In 2026, it’s about how we're going to accelerate and expand the private markets, and how we're going to embed intelligence deeper into workflows.

Then we want to look at how we support any operational friction, so advisors can spend more time advising and less time managing complexity. We also want to help [our client] firms deliver better outcomes for their clients.

We work with over 500 clients, including broker-dealers and asset managers. We need AI to support this industry. It's our obligation because we provide technology to so many different firms to really help them continue to scale, so they can grow. And with all this M&A activity, there's a lot of work that we're doing to help this industry.

Photo courtesy of InvestCloud