Artificial intelligence agents are being used by some registered investment advisors, with more uptake to come in the year ahead as the technology progresses, according to wealth management executives speaking at RIA Edge Los Angeles on Tuesday.
During one panel discussion, many advisors in the audience noted that they are already using AI note-taking to help run and follow up on client meetings. A few attendees said they also use AI agents to assist with projects.
“2026 is going to be the year of AI agents,” said panel moderator John O’Connell, founder and CEO of wealth technology firm The Oasis Group. “An agent takes an action on your behalf, with some predefined parameters, to basically execute a multi-step workload.”
Panelist Channing Olson, managing director and head of advisory technology and integration at Wealthspire, said the firm already uses single-step AI agents in workflow processes, such as finding contracts and populating the information for a human’s assessment.
“Currently, I have Wealthspire Agent One, and we can launch that agent to go look in SharePoint to find an old contract,” she said. “Can my agent go search the most recent contract and put it into Excel, and put the criteria of what the contract is—what’s the pricing? What’s the legal language? Does it meet our expectations? And from Excel, another human can intervene and put it into Salesforce.”
Channing said her team spent the year prior preparing for the agents by making sure their data was clean and usable and identifying “40-plus operational processes and documenting” to ensure it was doing what the firm needed it to do.
O’Connell and other panelists discussed the preparation needed for firms not yet using agents to start using them properly. Those steps included auditing and organizing client data, establishing data governance and procedures and mapping out transparent, step-by-step processes for execution.
Agentic AI has already been getting traction and funding in wealth management. Earlier this year, AI-notetaking, meeting and automation platform GReminders launched a fully autonomous “Do Anything” assistant, and this August, broker/dealer Cambridge Investment Research said it had developed an agentic AI tool to complete some of its direct account opening process—moving a 17-minute task to seconds.
Vickie Lewin, chief growth officer of wealth management platform Amplify, said at the conference that the firm is taking time to implement AI agents into its systems. Wealth management is a “highly regulated space, as it should be,” Lewin noted, and said Amplify has been working to cleanse data for AI agents to take on the “repetitive, somewhat mundane workflows” for RIAs.
“Our promise to clients who work with us is that you can double your AUM without doubling your head count, because we can automate all those mundane things that are taking time away from more productive client-facing activity,” she said.
Lewin differentiated AI agent work from replacing human advisors.
“When we think about the difference between an agent and a worker, we think about the difference between an apprentice and an employee,” she said. “You’ll have decision support, not decision making.”
On a separate AI panel Tuesday, RIA executives did grapple with the operational job changes, or even losses, that may come from AI use. The RIA leaders said communication and openness about those changes with staff will lead to the best results.
“The goal of AI is to drive efficiency, which should drive growth,” Taylor Matthews, co-founder and CEO of RIA Farther, told the audience. “If that is the case, talk to your client service [operations] members about the type of position that you are replacing with AI to try and elevate [their] job so [they] can be more proactive. … it is about elevation, not replacement.”
Andree Mohr, president of RIA Integrated Partners, said AI will result in some operational job cuts. Her firm’s approach, she said, is to be up front about the changes with staff and discuss the potential for different roles.
“We had intentional conversations with people who could see they were going to have roles replaced about how we can make them more impactful in the organization and allow them to do higher-value activities,” she said. “Being very forthright with your team members is extremely important because it is going to replace things that members of your team are doing today, as it should.”
Vladimir Voyuts, head of engineering at RIA platform provider Dynasty Financial Partners, said he is interested to see how AI agents start communicating with each other across platforms such as TAMPs and custodians in the year ahead.
“Everyone is creating some kind of new AI agent tool,” he said. “It will allow us to stitch together all of those great AI experiences under one umbrella … agent-to-agent communication will become standard and seeing those things playing together will be super exciting.”
O’Connell, looking even further ahead to 2027, said he expects the industry to discuss digital workers.
“Digital workers are going to take agents and string them together to do complex tasks that would normally be covered by a human being,” he said. “Digital workers are going to be fully automated. They’re only going to have a human in the loop when you tell it to have a human in the loop.”
