“ Advisors are evaluating technology, succession planning options, operational support and the overall experience they can deliver to their clients,” Cohen says.“ At the end of the day, advisors are looking for partners that help them grow while allowing them to fulfill their vision for how they want to serve clients.”
“ Independent financial advisors by their very nature are entrepreneurs,” says Todd Mackay, president of Cetera Wealth Management.“ They’ re most often looking for a new financial services partner because they want more flexibility to run their practice how they want and the greatest potential to accelerate their growth.”
Advisors, he adds,“ want personalized growth support that makes the big feel small. Our regional growth team approach delivers exactly that— one dedicated team that knows an advisor’ s practice intimately
“ Advisors are evaluating technology, succession planning options, operational support and the overall experience they can deliver to their clients. At the end of the day, advisors are looking for partners that help them grow while allowing them to fulfill their vision for how they want to serve clients.”
— Marc Cohen, group managing director and chief growth officer at LPL
while serving as their conduit into Cetera’ s full centralized resources.”
Likewise, John Amore, president of Kestra, says advisors desire personal connection. He says advisors“ want capital and technology behind them, a community they can actually learn from, and a partner that helps them grow. He adds,“ We’ re big enough to matter, but small enough to stay personal.”
AI In Play
Firms have long touted their enhanced technology platforms to lure advisors, but Amore and others say AI is now a key piece of the conversation.
“ We’ re getting sharper questions about our tech road map in recruiting conversations than we were even a year ago, and AI is increasingly part of that discussion. Advisors want to know how firms are using AI to create efficiencies, enhance client service, and help them operate more effectively,” he says. He adds that Kestra has introduced AI-powered capabilities for advisors and is investing in AI education across the organization.
“ Technology has always been important in recruiting, but AI is accelerating that trend,” says Cohen.“ Advisors evaluate not only a firm’ s current technology, but where that technology is headed. They want to feel confident that their partner is effectively capitalizing on the AI opportunity to enable them to work more efficiently, uncover growth opportunities and spend more time with clients.” Earlier this year, LPL expanded its relationship with Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company that developed Claude, to work on AI integrations for its advisors.“ We continue to invest and deploy more capabilities that will help advisors use AI to their advantage,” Cohen says.
At Raymond James, Perry says AI is“ everything.” She says her firm employs AI in many areas, including client service, advisor support and back office functions.“ We are letting technology take over where technology can actually do a smoother and faster job and [ be ] more accurate sometimes.”
For example, she says managers no longer manually listen to service calls for quality assurance. Instead, AI transcribes conversations, detects sentiment( frustration, happiness, etc.), and flags problematic calls for review and coaching. Raymond James also used AI to build a database with years of collected information that advisors and the homeoffice staff can tap to quickly find answers. When incoming information is combined with data analytics, the organization can use it more predictively, she says.
Perry also says the company has invested in AI tools such as Copilot, ChatGPT and Zoom AI to assist advisors with emails, presentations, and meeting notes.“ And if advisors aren’ t using it yet, they are still asking about it because clients are asking,” she says.
For all the trumpeting of AI, industry insiders agree that it cannot replace the personal touch that clients have come to expect from an advisor.
“ Clients want confidence in the person sitting across the table from them, not just confidence in the numbers,” says Cohen.“ The winners will be the firms that best combine technology and human connection, not the firms that choose between them. That is the experience we are building at LPL.”
Adds Amore,“ Going forward, firms that can thoughtfully integrate AI into the advisor experience will have a meaningful advantage.”
Amore and others point out that competition for advisors is only going increase since there are fewer firms.“ Consolidation has left fewer platforms to choose from, so the ones still standing have to prove their value and earn advisors’ confidence,” he says, adding that,“ advisors are thinking carefully about the long-term future of their businesses, including growth, succession, and how they’ ll continue serving increasingly complex client needs.”
“ The biggest trend we’ re seeing,” adds Mackay,“ is that advisors are no longer just choosing a broker-dealer— they’ re choosing a place they can grow into for the rest of their career, no matter how their business model evolves along the way. The throughline across all of it— advisors want one place that can support every stage of that journey without ever having to leave.”
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2026 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 29