AI for RIAs: You Need to Be Using It. Here’s Where to Start.

The industry conversation about AI has been stuck on the wrong question for two years. Will it replace advisors, will clients accept it, is it a bubble. None of that helps you on a Tuesday. The useful question is narrower: which parts of your week are you doing by hand that you no longer have to?

That’s a smaller question and it has real answers. Here’s where advisors are actually getting time back, and where the risk sits.

Start with the work no client ever sees

The safest place to begin is internal work with no client data in it. Drafting a job description. Turning a messy set of notes into an agenda. Summarizing a fund prospectus you need the gist of before a meeting. Writing the first version of a process document you’ve been meaning to write for three years. This work is low stakes, it’s easy to check, and it’s where most advisors first notice the tools are genuinely good rather than a novelty.

It’s also the fastest way to build judgment about what these tools get wrong, which you want before you point them at anything that matters.

Meeting notes: the obvious first win and the obvious first risk

Transcription and summarization of client meetings is the single most popular use in this industry right now, and it isn’t hard to see why. It hands back the twenty minutes after every meeting that used to go to writing things up, and the notes are usually more complete than what you’d have typed.

The risk isn’t the summary. It’s everything around it: whether the client was told and agreed, where the recording is stored, who else can reach it, how long it’s retained, and whether the tool is training on what you feed it. Those are answerable questions, and the answer is different for every vendor. Ask them before you turn it on, not after. Any tool touching a client conversation belongs in your compliance file with the same seriousness as your CRM.

Client communication: it’s a drafting problem, not a thinking problem

AI is good at producing a competent first draft of a quarterly letter, a market note, or an explanation of a rebalance. It isn’t good at deciding what your clients need to hear, and it defaults to a bland institutional voice that sounds like everyone else. Used well, it moves you from a blank page to editing, which is the part most advisors are slow at. Used badly, it publishes something you didn’t really read. The line is whether you’d sign your name to the sentence, which is the same standard that applied before any of this existed.

Research: useful for orientation, unreliable as a source

Ask a general-purpose model for a summary of a sector, an explanation of a structure you don’t use often, or a list of what to look into on a holding, and it will get you oriented in a few minutes. Ask it for a specific number, a fund expense ratio, or a citation, and it will sometimes produce a confident and wrong answer. Treat it as a starting point that sends you to a real source, never as the source. Anything that ends up in front of a client gets verified independently.

What not to put in

The short version: no client names, account numbers, Social Security numbers, statements, or tax documents into any consumer tool you haven’t vetted and don’t have an agreement with. Not because the technology is unsafe in some abstract sense, but because you’d be handing custody of client information to a vendor you have no contract with. The business versions of these tools exist for exactly this reason and are worth the difference in price.

A first ninety days that actually works

Pick one recurring task that takes you more than an hour a week and doesn’t involve client data. Use a tool on it every week for a month and keep track of whether it saved time or just moved it around. If it worked, add a second task. Then, and only then, look at anything client-facing, with your compliance process involved from the start.

That’s deliberately unambitious, and it’s the version that sticks. The advisors who get nowhere with this are usually the ones who bought four subscriptions in one month, which is its own kind of expensive. If you’re adding tools, it’s worth looking at the ones you already pay for at the same time. We covered that in our practice overhead checklist.

None of this requires you to have an opinion about where the technology is going. It requires you to look at your own week honestly and pick one thing off it.

AI adoption is one piece of the wider technology and practice picture. We write about the rest of it on our advisor resources page.