FA’ S 2025 RIA SURVEY & RANKING

BY ERIC RASMUSSEN

OU’ VE HEARD THE NUMBERS. THIRTY-EIGHT percent of advisors( with 42 % of total industry assets) are retiring in the next 10 years. The profession is going to be short 100,000 advisors by 2034, according to McKinsey & Co.

And yet the consulting firm also says that revenues coming from fee-based advisory relationships are growing and surged from $ 150 billion in 2015 to $ 260 billion in 2024. So a huge increase is already coming and there will be more demand … and yet fewer advisors.

Who is stepping in to fill the gap? According to some RIA firm chief executives, artificial intelligence will be the next major league player in the advisory space. People are taking notes with it, fighting cybercrime with it, and flipping through client statements looking for planning opportunities. More machines are going to be talking to more machines about how to help clients.

So is an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator figure from the future arriving shortly as an advisor and saying, perhaps,“ I’ ll be back with your plan?”

Not quite. Just like zoo animals, the robots are going to need a lot of humans cleaning up after them— making sure the data lakes( which are getting huge) are secure and making sure the data has integrity. As we know, transcription programs don’ t always get things right. But it might indeed be a future where, with AI’ s help, advisors find clients, not the other way around.

Brent Brodeski, the founder and CEO of Savant Wealth Management in Rockford, Ill., says the industry will be completely transformed in the next three to five years with unified fintech and account consolidation. In business, he explains, there are usually first adopters and fast followers in any business. This time, however, even the fast followers are going to have a hard time catching up.

“ It used to take 100 years to change, right? Or 50 years.” Now, he says, the changes are going to happen in five years and the winners will be determined in three.

It’ s the firms building the right platforms that will succeed— the ones set for growth with their people and processes.

Susie Cranston, the president and chief operating officer at Chicago-based Cresset, says note-taking talk is really just scratching the surface of what AI can do.

Take all the preparation work that an advisor might do“ when you’ re onboarding a client,” she says. That means“ looking at

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