Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the investment landscape as we know it, and one of the biggest challenges facing the wealth management industry is how to harness AI to deliver more meaningful client relationships.

According to Anish Shah, Product Lead of BNY’s Wealth Services Platform Wove, “Clients are expecting personalized experiences. They’re expecting predictive experiences and at the same time, they want these experiences to be deeply human.”

There is no question that AI will continue to dramatically reshape the wealth management landscape and, perhaps most importantly, redefine the role of the advisor. In the near term, AI will primarily handle transactional and administrative tasks, freeing up advisors to spend more time engaging directly with clients. David Barnard, Founder and CEO of Luminary Technologies, Inc., a data and collaboration platform for trust and estate services, pointed out that only 20 percent of an advisor’s time is spent in front of a client, while the other 80 percent is being spent on administrative and meeting preparation tasks. With the help of AI, Barnard envisions a future where that ratio is flipped. “Just imagine what that could look like from a client experience perspective,” said Barnard.

Using AI and Data to Deliver Personalized Financial Advice

When considering how wealth management firms can unlock the true potential of AI, Anu Rajan, Director of Product at Arta Finance, emphasized that success starts with data. She sees data’s role in wealth management across three key dimensions: building strong client relationships, deepening client loyalty and engagement and enhancing investment research through AI-powered financial advisor technology tools.

“We now have the ability to quickly make sense of the unstructured data coming out of conversations with end clients, turning that into a structured model that can be used to make very relevant, tailored recommendations,” she explained. For example, Rajan believes that being able to accelerate the onboarding process for new clients with the help of AI —including suitability assessments and know your customer (KYC) verifications — not only drives efficiency but also helps strengthen those critical early client relationships. By improving both the quality and accessibility of data, firms can lay the groundwork for more personalized and impactful client experiences.

Beyond efficiency, actionable insights generated by AI stand to raise the standard of care that firms can provide their clients and can potentially free up advisors’ capacity for spending more time on cultivating a true client connection.

“There are tools that allow you to look across vast data sets that are now connected to create a page, or a couple pages of data to make an interaction with a client as productive as possible,” explained Barnard.

Today, advisors can have a team of AI agent analysts at their disposal, facilitating security analysis and investment research to help create truly tailored portfolios for their clients.

By enabling advisors to prepare more effectively for client meetings and deliver deeper insights in less time, AI-driven data platforms can help make every client interaction more valuable while still being personal.

AI in Wealth Management: Trust, Transparency and Limitations

However, the journey toward AI-powered personalization in financial services is not without challenges and data quality is one of the most significant obstacles to adoption. Rajan emphasized that organizations must pay close attention to where their upstream data originates to ensure accuracy, freshness, and lack of bias — all critical factors that, if overlooked, could perpetuate or amplify existing disparities in the data when used in predictive models.

The adoption of AI tools is also raising new questions around trust and compliance. “I can’t imagine a world where it would be acceptable for things like client data to be used for model training purposes without total transparency and consent,” Barnard said, emphasizing the need for responsible data stewardship. “Understanding those data processing agreements and understanding what happens downstream is not difficult — you just have to know to ask the question.” Rajan agrees and emphasized that when making the case for the value of personalization with AI, both internally and for clients, firms need to “consider the full data chain — where [data is] coming from, what’s being done with it, and where it is going.”

AI-Powered Advisor Enablement and the Future of Financial Advice

While AI is increasingly capable of mimicking human interactions such as adapting to individual communication styles and reflecting client preferences, its effectiveness is still limited without human guidance and intervention. As client needs become more complex and the number of advisors shrinks, the demand for genuine, human-delivered advice continues to grow. The future of wealth management, Rajan explained, is a hybrid model where advisors can reclaim time from easily automated tasks and redirect it toward the things AI still cannot do - providing empathy, strategic thinking and building deep client trust.