PARTING SHOT

AI lets every advisor become world-class in anticipating their clients’ needs.

VEN IN A WORLD OF RAPIDLY CHANGING TECHNOLOGY, THE fundamentals of great service for financial advisory clients haven’ t changed.

Yet artificial intelligence is going to have a profound effect on advisors’ business anyway, since it lets every professional become extraordinarily perceptive in anticipating their clients’ needs and be more proactive in addressing client problems. That means advisors can deliver the kind of service to all their clients that they likely reserved for tier-one clients in the past. Artificial intelligence is also going to change advisory firms’ ability to achieve better organic growth. Here’ s how:

1. The capacity ceiling is finally movable. Time is arguably the biggest constraint on financial advisors— and thus the growth of their firms. Most advisors are already working long hours, and unless they can add staff, there’ s a hard limit on how many households they can serve well, how many prospects they can follow up with quickly, and how many opportunities they can actually act on. So imagine what happens if they could get back 10 hours every week. That’ s what advisors consistently tell us they recover when they stop doing manually what AI can automate— things like taking meeting notes, updating their CRMs, following up with clients assigning tasks and replying to email.

Across a full year, that’ s roughly 500 hours, or about 25 % of a typical working year. For an advisor at max capacity, this really changes how they approach growth.

We have seen the ramifications of this increased productivity. Some advisors use the recovered time to engage clients they previously didn’ t have time to get to— people who were technically“ in the book” but rarely heard from. Others have invested more time in marketing and bringing in new households. Some just stop working the hours they were working before. All these outcomes are good ones; the advisor simply gets to choose among them.

2. Speed allows you to convert more new clients than you realize. Once an advisor has more capacity, they have more time to turn prospects into clients, mostly by following up with them more quickly. An advisor once told me:“ If you’ re in growth mode, faster follow-ups mean you’ ll convert around 20 % more new clients.”

Let’ s imagine what it feels like to be a prospect after a meeting with a financial advisor. Say the first meeting with the advisor went well. But then you don’ t hear from the advisor again for four or five days, and when you do, the proposal you hear feels as if it could have been written for anyone.

That kind of disconnect was common in the days before AI, since it took days and weeks for the advisor to chase more details about people, put together a personalized financial plan, and get to that next meeting. By the time the advisor had sat down again with the prospect, the momentum from the first meeting had faded.

AI collapses that process, since it can connect and act across all of an advisor’ s systems, including CRM, planning, and account openings, and thus trigger and automate workflows that make plan development and execution much faster. We’ re now seeing advisors ship a tailored financial plan out within 10 to 15 minutes of a meeting ending. One advisor we work with at Zocks closed a $ 6 million client after their second meeting.

If an advisor follows up quickly and shows the client they actually listened, the client is much more inclined to match the speed and commit. AI removes the operational friction.

3. The biggest growth opportunity is already in your book. But prospects aside, the larger, less-discussed opportunity is hidden inside the book of business you already have— in your current client households.

Those clients are going to be facing big ticket expenses or liquidity events— things like weddings and college payments and inheritances, which means changing circumstances and financial gaps. You’ re of- continued on page 58

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