According to a recent study from Schwab Advisor Services, 63% of advisors are now using AI in some capacity. However, the RIA AI landscape remains highly experimental: only about 10% of firms report having fully integrated AI into their core strategy, while 30% say they are still just experimenting.
So, if 2025 was the year of the AI notetakers, how can firms take the next step and truly harness this massive technological shift through the rest of 2026?
On today’s show, I welcome back Lisa Salvi, Managing Director of Business Consulting and Education at Schwab Advisor Services. We discuss the current pace of AI innovation and why AI is forcing advisors to redefine their core value proposition and how they communicate it to the marketplace.
3 Insights from Lisa Salvi
1. AI Has Broken Moore’s Law.
Advisors have heard the “This changes everything” narrative before, from the rise of online banking in the 1990s through the more recent roboadvisor craze. The industry adapted, evolved, and kept thriving.
But Lisa Salvi says AI really is a different beast, not just because of what it can already do but because of how quickly it’s going to be able to do more and more complicated tasks.
“For all of history around technology, there’s been something called Moore’s Law, which is how you measure the level of technological improvement. Historically, for the last fifty years, we would see a doubling in capabilities every eighteen to twenty-four months, and that was true through everything — through the internet, through computers, through smartphones, through social media. What is happening right now is we’re seeing a doubling in AI capabilities every six months, and some people would say that’s four months. The reason for that is just an explosion in the capabilities of the AI itself. AI can now write the code, it can develop its own experiments. If you’ve ever seen a cursor move around the screen and execute for you, it’s not just providing answers; it’s doing full-on execution.“
For advisory firm leaders, this means traditional three-to-five-year strategic plans are vulnerable to disruption — tomorrow. You cannot simply delegate AI to your IT department. Lisa challenges every single person within a firm to develop genuine AI fluency.
And RIA Leaders have to lead that development by using the tools, understanding their trajectory, and modeling adaptation for your employees in empowering, non-threatening ways (more on that below).
2. Agents Are the New Assistants.
Many firms are currently using AI as an assistant: summarizing meetings, drafting emails, answering technical questions, and providing chatbot customer service.
But these efficiency upgrades are now table stakes. Lisa Salvi says that the next revolution will be AI agents that can handle much more sophisticated tasks with minimum oversight.
“We are moving right now from AI being able to answer things and do simple tasks to executing work. What we see from our research is only 9% of firms are using agents, while 28% want to. I think that will grow very rapidly. As that starts to happen, work will be able to be done quickly. It won’t take as many human ‘doers’; it will take more human ‘overseers.’ So we need to be crystal clear about what our value proposition is, because our value is not obvious. We need to be able to justify it, and our clients are going to need to see what they’re paying for because it’s going to look different than it did in the past.“
Lisa says this shift could profoundly impact firm P&Ls and operational structures. As digital coworkers take on more and more tasks, your firm’s productivity might be able to scale even if your talent pool holds steady.
“At Schwab, in our service organization — which is where most of our people are and most of our costs are — we opened 1.5 million new accounts last year. Yet, we were able to keep our headcount in service flat. That is due to a variety of things, including better digital tools. But we also have an overlay to our knowledge management base that can help them pull really good answers, like an LLM knowledge assistant. And we can do sentiment analysis on calls now to pinpoint where more training needs to happen or where a process might not be working. Those are small AI things that are already helping. Advisors are happier than they’ve ever been, and we brought down our cost per account. I don’t know that that means you’re getting rid of all the jobs. You might just not be replacing, adding a whole bunch more expense. We know that 68% of cost within a firm is the people-related expense. That might come down a little, and the way that people are spending their time might feel higher-value. Right now, the back-of-the-napkin math is that you hire a new role for every $400,000 in revenue. Will that start to change? I think it might. I think you might not need to hire as many roles, which is good because we’ve had a talent shortage in this industry.“
3. Elevate Your Value — and Make It Obvious.
So, if AI coworkers eventually automate 60% to 75% of the technical, operational, and planning tasks inside an advisory firm, then what’s left for the human advisor?
If you’re thinking the answer is, “fee compression,” Lisa Salvi says that hasn’t materialized … yet. But margin compression certainly has as many advisors are doing vastly more work today for the exact same fee.
Lisa and I agree it’s likely that the whole industry might soon be facing a “barbell effect.” At the lower end, AI will remove friction, making it easier and cheaper for consumers with less complicated financial lives to manage their own situation (although many will still choose to delegate to an advisor). At the high end of wealth, advisors may become even more in demand as life becomes more complicated and the stakes become higher.
In the meantime, Lisa warns that advisors can’t assume folks understand the nuances of your behind-the-scenes transition as it’s happening. You need to make what’s often invisible — your hard work and the value of your advice — visible. Now.
Otherwise, clients and prospects are going to have a harder and harder time distinguishing what you do from what AI and apps do at a fraction of the cost.
“I think people still do want to work with a person who understands them and their entire financial picture and all of that complexity. We say this all the time: your value is not obvious. You have to be crystal clear on what your value is that you are delivering, and that’s going to be more important in the future as AI can do more of those tasks. I think advisors do so much for their clients that their clients often know nothing about. So does that mean once a year you sit down and you go, ‘Let’s just review all the things we did that were really beneficial, and by the way, we also do these other things.’ Not to be boring, not to pat themselves on the back, but just going through the wins we had this year. Because your value is not obvious, and if you’re not making sure that you’re clear on what that is with your clients, you could be more exposed.“
Lisa Salvi’s Warning for Advisors
Fix Your Data and Lead Your People or Fear Will Take Over.
Now is the time to develop your AI integration plan. The longer you wait, the further behind the curve your firm is going to fall.
But before you can deploy sophisticated digital coworkers, you have to do the unglamorous homework. AI engines run on data. And if your firm’s data is siloed, messy, or unstructured, Lisa Salvi says your AI upgrades will fail.
“Knowing who owns your data is going to be more important than ever. I know this is like saying ‘Do your homework,’ and we always want to talk about the fun, flashy things. But who owns your data? How do you collect your data? Are you structuring your data with terms that make sense across the board? Because that clean data is going to be what feeds all the AI capabilities in the future. We’ve seen so much M&A in our industry and all of those data structures and systems aren’t always cleaned up and structured super well. But if you want to build an agent, or a digital coworker, having good data is going to be really important for that.“
Perhaps the bigger warning is psychological. Your team is reading the same headlines you are. They know AI is advancing at a dizzying rate. And what the boss calls a “productivity enhancement” they see as a threat to their jobs.
Lisa Salvi says reassurance from the top isn’t enough. Leaders have to lead at this critical moment — with the same humanity that’s going to truly define the next stage of your firm’s evolution.
“The next few years are going to be really emotional and there are going to be people who might feel like there’s a little bit of an identity crisis as their job and what they’ve learned starts to change on a daily basis. The ethics, the responsibility, the way we keep track of what these tools are doing, the way we share the benefits: there’s some mind-bending questions that a small number of people are making decisions around. As leaders, we should lean in on all trying to take a little piece of our little corner of responsibility.“
