FA Magazine July/August 2026 | Page 54

Parting Shot continued from page 60

ten not thinking of these things until a client brings them up.

It’ s true, you can’ t treat 100 clients as if each were your best friend. So what you do find out is usually gleaned during annual reviews or occasional phone calls, and you’ re likely hoping you aren’ t missing too much in between.

That changes with AI, which has access to past conversations, meeting notes, emails, CRM records, financial plans, tax records, and portfolio data for everyone in your book. That means the technology can start asking questions it wasn’ t practical for you to constantly ask before: For example, which of your clients have kids under 10 years old but no 529 plan? Which of your clients are self-employed but don’ t have a SEP IRA or solo 401( k)? Who has grandkids but hasn’ t discussed a gifting strategy? Who’ s approaching their required minimum distribution age but likely doesn’ t have a distribution plan in place?

These are not complicated questions, but in the past they required you to do manual research through dozens of client records in siloed systems— mundane work that most advisory teams don’ t have the bandwidth to do consistently. AI can now run those queries for the entire book, find the matches, create the opportunity in the CRM system, and draft the outreach. The opportunities were always there. But you can find them at scale and act in real time when it matters the most.

4. The economics of client service are changing. In wealth management, hightouch service has mostly been viable only for top-tier clients. That means a client with $ 5 million in manageable assets gets regular personalized outreach, coordinated tax and estate planning, as well as an advisor who really knows their life. A client with $ 200,000, on the other hand, has merely gotten an annual review and is the one doing the calling.

This separation was a practical necessity, not a choice based on values. The human effort required to serve someone deeply has never scaled linearly, and so firms have optimized by segmenting harder and reserving white-glove work for the top tiers.

AI changes the cost structure underneath that math. Monitoring a client for estate planning signals, tracking life milestones to trigger relevant outreach, identifying planning gaps within a household’ s

financial picture— these used to require expensive, manual workflows. Now, with AI, these actions can run in parallel, continuously, at near-zero marginal cost per client.

Imagine one AI agent querying RMD eligibility for a firm’ s hundreds of clients while another is flagging households with concentrated positions ahead of a potential market event. Perhaps another is identifying clients with company benefit plans who haven’ t been contacted in the last 12 months. The proactive, coordinated service that used to be reserved for a $ 5 million client can now be delivered to a $ 200,000 client at a fraction of the cost and time.

Where This Leaves The Industry

The advisory industry faces a real structural challenge, and clients’ expectations are going to be getting higher. The growth ceiling that has defined this industry for a long time hasn’ t disappeared. But for the first time, it’ s genuinely movable, and the distance between firms that act on that now and those that wait is going to get bigger quickly.

MARK GILBERT is the CEO and co-founder of Zocks, the privacy-first AI Assistant for financial advisors.

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58 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | JULY / AUGUST 2026 WWW. FA-MAG. COM