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Artificial intelligence agents are being used by some registered investment advisors, with more uptake to come in the year ahead as the technology progresses, according to wealth management executives speaking at RIA Edge Los Angeles on Tuesday.
During one panel discussion, many advisors in the audience noted that they are already using AI note-taking to help run and follow up on client meetings. A few attendees said they also use AI agents to assist with projects.
“2026 is going to be the year of AI agents,” said panel moderator John O’Connell, founder and CEO of wealth technology firm The Oasis Group. “An agent takes an action on your behalf, with some predefined parameters, to basically execute a multi-step workload.”
Panelist Channing Olson, managing director and head of advisory technology and integration at Wealthspire, said the firm already uses single-step AI agents in workflow processes, such as finding contracts and populating the information for a human’s assessment.
“Currently, I have Wealthspire Agent One, and we can launch that agent to go look in SharePoint to find an old contract,” she said. “Can my agent go search the most recent contract and put it into Excel, and put the criteria of what the contract is—what’s the pricing? What’s the legal language? Does it meet our expectations? And from Excel, another human can intervene and put it into Salesforce.”
Channing said her team spent the year prior preparing for the agents by making sure their data was clean and usable and identifying “40-plus operational processes and documenting” to ensure it was doing what the firm needed it to do.
O’Connell and other panelists discussed the preparation needed for firms not yet using agents to start using them properly. Those steps included auditing and organizing client data, establishing data governance and procedures and mapping out transparent, step-by-step processes for execution.
Agentic AI has already been getting traction and funding in wealth management. Earlier this year, AI-notetaking, meeting and automation platform GReminders launched a fully autonomous “Do Anything” assistant, and this August, broker/dealer Cambridge Investment Research said it had developed an agentic AI tool to complete some of its direct account opening process—moving a 17-minute task to seconds.
Vickie Lewin, chief growth officer of wealth management platform Amplify, said at the conference that the firm is taking time to implement AI agents into its systems. Wealth management is a “highly regulated space, as it should be,” Lewin noted, and said Amplify has been working to cleanse data for AI agents to take on the “repetitive, somewhat mundane workflows” for RIAs.
