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Artificial intelligence has been the unavoidable focus of attention for firm leaders, retail advisors and conference attendees this year, as firms contend with how best to integrate the potential promise AI holds into their workflows.
Accompanying the rise of generative and agentic AI has been an explosion in the number of service providers touting their AI bona fides. However, some technology experts (including those in AI-based vendors) are warning providers and firms alike to be wary of a kind of mission creep in offering AI solutions to all problems.
According to Sanctuary Wealth Chief Technology Officer Bob Coppola, trying to ensure firms “stay in (their) lane” is becoming a challenge when dealing with some AI-forward providers. Coppola said Sanctuary had gone as far as to “force’ integration with its customer relationship management system to avoid problems.
“But it’s getting harder, because we’re seeing a lot of the AI-based vendors are straying from what I would consider to be their core competency because they can,” Coppola said during a panel at the BNY INSITE conference this week in Aurora, Colo. “And the challenge that you have is it becomes anarchy.”
For Coppola and others at the conference, one of the biggest pitfalls in integrating AI vendor tools was maintaining legible data. According to Coppola, data is more important in the age of AI than ever before, as it will serve as the foundation for AI’s learning.
“I think that one of the challenges that we run into now is everybody thinks AI is the easy button; ‘AI will manage the data for me,’” he said. “And there’s a lot of truth that it will learn from data. But if your data is inconsistent and you’re calling a security something different in three different places, the AI is going to be confused.”
On the sidelines of the conference, Zocks Chief Strategy Officer Steven Latow affirmed that RIAs (and, by extension, their service providers) are under pressure to “AI everything,” and coupled with the explosion of funding in the space for AI-native companies, it creates “this kind of smashing together of opportunity without a clear definition of the problem, and pressure to go build around it.”
Zocks runs an AI assistant, notetaker and meeting automation tool for financial advisors, offering CRM tools, financial planning systems, tax software and portfolio management tools, building automated workflows for client onboarding, account openings and document processing, among other needs.
