which means someone with 100 clients could perhaps handle 125 or 150 and get more value out of the relationships and thus become more profitable. And that’ s going to be important in an age where the number of new potential clients is booming amid the great wealth transfer— while at the same time the number of advisors is shrinking and going offline( in part because they are aging into retirement).
Tash Elwyn, the president of Raymond James’ s Private Client Group, says AI will be both friend and foe to advisors. The most important thing it’ s going to give them is more capacity to engage human-to-human.
“ Some examples of where we’ ve been strategically frontfooted in regards to partnering with advisors would be using technologies like Zoom AI [ Companion ], where we have the ability now for advisors to have an AI co-pilot, if you will, engaged in the client meeting, whether it’ s an in-person meeting or a Zoom meeting, and then creating summaries of those meetings,” Elwyn says.“ And that both
Investors likely feared AI Armageddon— that the computers threatening to replace human workers in everything from high-level management jobs to trucking to software development had finally come for brokerages, custodians and financial advisors, too.
increases the efficiency of the follow-through of the financial advisor, as well as the prep time for the next meeting. … As one of the advisors on our next-gen technology advisory council told me this past summer, leveraging just that tool, Zoom AI, has reduced his meeting prep time and follow-up time by 90 minutes per client per quarter.
“ A second example would be that we have recently introduced an AI tool at Raymond James that we call‘ RAI’— Raymond James AI. [ This ] takes the entire knowledge base of Raymond James in terms of what we would traditionally have referred to as our intranet, and it digitizes all of that in a manner that it becomes searchable in an AI prompt. … And so it allows you to do free-form searches, very complex prompts, and then curate all of the subject matter expertise within the firm in a way that within seconds it puts those insights right back at the fingertips of the financial advisor and the branch professional.”
The Commonwealth Shakeup
Broker-dealers are being shaken up by things other than AI of course. There’ s a battle royale on for advisors as their ranks shrink and their assets swell in a bull market. The valuations of advisory practices have also been going up as private equity money comes into the space— luring advisors to the higher-margin, higher-valuation, fee-only
space— and broker-dealers have been trying to keep advisors from leaving them to join the ranks of RIAs or other B-D platforms by offering them sweet incentive deals and succession plans to help them monetize a life’ s work.
In the recruiting world, the biggest shakeup, of course, was LPL’ s purchase of Commonwealth and its 2,900 advisors for $ 2.7 billion in cash, a deal that closed in August. Early on, LPL said it should retain 90 % of those advisors, but AdvizorPro had counted some some 800 departures( 630 or so counted as going to other registered firms) as of early March, a 27 % loss. Now LPL says its goal is to retain 90 % of Commonwealth’ s assets.
Shortly after the Commonwealth deal was announced, LPL CEO Rich Steinmeier acknowledged that it expected a group of Commonwealth-affiliated advisors to leave the B-D world entirely and go RIA-only( Commonwealth had been building its own RIA custodian platform in an effort to retain these reps for several years.) According to an AdvizorPro study late in 2025, about 35 % of departing Commonwealth advisors chose that route.
Commonwealth’ s culture was famously more hightouch and tech-insular, and the culture clash was apparent to many. So other firms scrambled to pick up those defectors. Raymond James and Ameriprise were said to be offering 125 % of trailing-12-month production for unhappy Commonwealth reps. RayJay has been particularly aggressive( and one of the biggest winners of defectors). That’ s not surprising, as rumors had leaked that it was a candidate to buy Commonwealth itself, before LPL outbid it.
“ I think by far the biggest inducement [ for broker-dealers to advisors ] is the forgivable loan, and those numbers have gone way up really since last May, when LPL bought Commonwealth,” says Louis Diamond, CEO of headhunting firm Diamond Consultants. That’ s caused an industrywide reset, he says.“ Pretty much all the firms, like, really stepped up their offers, and at least for now, those deals are staying around.”
Jodie Papike, a CEO at recruiting firm Cross-Search, says that all the consolidation has made advisors a bit wary, since they aren’ t sure who they are going to be working with in the next few years. Meanwhile, the lines between business channels are becoming blurry with all the private equity money looking to buy in.
24 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | MARCH / APRIL 2026 WWW. FA-MAG. COM