Kevin Hughes, president of financial planning at Advyzon.
Kevin Hughes has been busy lately, to say the least.
He's a husband and father of two middle schoolers — one a dedicated cheerleader and the other an avid soccer player. In his spare time, he enjoys playing guitar and sharing his love of music with others. (He said he's in the middle of learning the Phish song "Esther.")
But it's his role at Advyzon, where Hughes is the president of financial planning, that's keeping him busy shaping the firm's vision and ensuring integration across the platform's technology suite. He's in the middle of helping roll out Advyzon's agentic artificial intelligence framework in its financial planning and goal analysis features over the next few months.
"I've been in there building financial plans in it," he tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview. "I've been testing its capabilities for financial planning, tax reading and tax insights, and I'm just blown away. … We're all over the moon at how well it's coming along. And we've been showing it to all our customers and they're excited. So, it's moving in a fantastic direction."
With this in mind, Hughes had a lot to say about how AI is showing up in the wealth management industry.
In the interview, he discusses how much technology advisors use in financial planning, how Advyzon is thinking about AI, and whether advisors should lose sleep over AI taking their jobs.
Here are the highlights of our conversation:
THINKADVISOR: In general, how much technology do advisors use now to do financial planning? How much AI do they use for financial planning? What does this use of AI in financial planning look like to the advisor versus the client?
KEVIN HUGHES: What I see in the RIA space that's unique is that they are using a lot of different tools for a lot of different topics. All of the firms that are offering financial planning are typically using one of the big three that are out there. But then they're adding on things like a tax planning tool. Or they're adding on a retirement income tool.
It's got to be really frustrating for those advisors having to use all these different tools to tell what is ultimately, from an Advyzon point of view, a financial planning story. It depends on the size of the firm, but when you get into it, the firms that are serious about it, it's a whole lot of tech to support it, and a lot of it is not integrated with each other.
THINKADVISOR: With Advyzon, how much AI is incorporated into the planning tools now and what are you prioritizing for 2026 and 2027?
KEVIN HUGHES: Specifically to planning, the tool that we're going to be rolling out later this year, full holistic planning, will have AI insights. It'll be able to combine features that are in the broader realm of Advyzon, like tax-loss harvesting, asset allocation and performance into that planning experience. Typically, those are bifurcated these days because the planning software sits off on an island.
We've already been blown away by our AI document reading and data injection capability. That's been out for about two months now.
I'm working on a cool AI budgeting tool right now to make creating budgets a one-click process.
I'm having a whole bunch of fun in our agentic experience creating a whole host of skills to help advisors get answers to quick questions.
The big thing for us is that we want to make creating and delivering plans so much easier than it has ever been before for advisors.
THINKADVISOR: Should advisors fear AI when it comes to financial planning? Will it take their jobs — soon or down the road?
KEVIN HUGHES: There are few industries out there, just given how fast AI is evolving, where that concern doesn't exist. Everywhere from developers to creatives to lawyers and CPAs.
I don't think advisors have much at all to fear with AI taking their job, especially as it relates to planning.
I think where advisors stand to advance is being able to be a coach; to be that human being who is actually helping implement the plan. The AI needs to make creating comprehensive planning and all the advice that gets exposed in that process so much easier and faster. But at the end of the day … the value of the advisor is the human touch.
I'll put it in a personal context: My son's 12. He plays goalie on a travel soccer team. When he's trying to make the decision on the fly of, "Should I charge this person coming at me and try and slide in and get whaled in the face, probably by a foot, or should I sit back and try and block a shot?" … There's a coach on the sidelines saying, "This is what you did wrong," or, "Before that ever happened, here, we're going to practice this kind of stuff." And I think that advisors are similar.
THINKADVISOR: How can AI help advisors with financial planning in ways that both advisors and clients are comfortable with in 2026? In other words, how can advisors best embrace AI without alienating clients who ask, "Why should I pay for your services if they are being done by AI?" Especially because AI is bad at math. It hallucinates. Microsoft Copilot's terms of service even say it's for "entertainment purposes only."
KEVIN HUGHES: That's a great point you bring up. … When I started playing with ChatGPT, when it started to get powerful … I could go in there and say, "I'm this age. I make this much money. My wife doesn't work in my case. She's this old. We have two kids. I have this much money. I'd like to retire at age 65. What's my likelihood of being able to do that?" It came back and said, "Hey, you didn't tell me how much Social Security. Here's approximately how much Social Security someone like you, making what you make, would get. Do you want to include that?" And it was literally guiding me through the what-if scenarios. To your second point, when I was all done with it, yes, I was blown away, but then I said, "Could this pass Morgan Stanley's modern model governance committee on the calculations?" And it did exactly what you saw in Copilot. It was like, "Absolutely not. This is for informational and entertainment purposes. This is not anywhere close to real financial planning software capability, accuracy and long-term planning."
So when a client asks an advisor who is using Advyzon for planning, the advisor can say, "Look, yeah, we use AI to help us be a lot more efficient in the practice, but the financial planning software is real code. If you go into our agentic AI and say, 'Run a retirement plan for so-and-so,' it's running the calculations in the software. … It's all defendable calculations we have a methodology for. So there's no real hallucinating going on there. That's not happening in Advyzon because it's, it's referencing all the data that we already have on the client. AI is guiding you through and pointing out areas that you might have missed in something."
THINKADVISOR: When it comes to AI, what are you most excited about and what challenges keep you up at night?
KEVIN HUGHES: There are jobs that are inevitably going to change. But humanity always finds a way to adapt. Do the jobs change and become different? Yes.
What keeps me up a little bit at night: Is some AI robot going to be able to do every piece of manual labor out there and suddenly there's just no need for that kind of thing anymore?
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