Key Takeaways:
If you've been to a financial services conference in the past year or so, you've felt the energy in the room. AI is everywhere: on the mainstage, in breakout sessions, and in every vendor booth conversation.
There’s plenty of buzz, and beneath it, real opportunity for advisor marketing teams.
But somewhere between the keynote demos and the cocktail hour chatter, most firms are still wrestling with the same question: Where do we begin?
That question is exactly why, over the past several weeks, we’ve been talking with advisors and marketing leaders across RIA firms to understand how they’re really using AI in their marketing (and what's been working).
What we heard was honest, occasionally blunt, and a lot more interesting than the hype cycle suggests.
AI for financial advisors has moved well past the theoretical stage. At every firm we talked to, someone is using it:
But that's the pattern: individuals testing and adopting different AI tools for various tasks (like email or note-taking), completely siloed from one another.
Until advisors see how content supports their growth over time, even the best tools tend to go unused. When the connection between a LinkedIn post and a new client relationship isn't immediately visible, it's understandable that content slides down the priority list.
One advisor was candid about this, noting that his colleagues would likely say a new AI tool sounds great, but many wouldn’t use it:
“It's still hard for individuals to find the time unless they decide to commit and buy into the long-term process of creating content and building an audience.”
Compliance adds a layer, too, though it may be less of a wall than most people assume. The firms we spoke with have social media compliance tools in place, and the review process is relatively smooth.
The more pressing concern right now is about AI itself: AI-generated content can pull in facts or statistics without preserving source links, or can even “hallucinate” information, which creates books-and-records issues many firms haven't started addressing yet.
The best results we heard about in our interviews had one thing in common: the advisor stayed involved.
When someone feeds their own perspective, writing samples, and brand context into an AI tool, then stays in the loop through multiple rounds of refinement, the output tends to sound like them.
When someone clicks "generate" and publishes whatever comes back, the output tends to sound polished, passable, and forgettable.
From what we're seeing, the sweet spot is in the scaffolding:
That balance may shift as the tools get smarter. But the principle that the best content still needs a real human point of view seems likely to hold for a while.
If anyone at your firm is using AI for marketing, even casually, there are a few things worth locking down now.
Most firms we spoke with don't have one. Three advisors using three different tools with no shared guidelines is a recipe for content that sounds like it was written by three different firms.
This is also an opportunity to establish compliance-friendly guidelines, so your entire team knows what kind of client information, if any, belongs in their LLM.
The most common concern we heard is that AI makes everything sound the same. One client summed it up perfectly:
"How do we help it make us faster and better, but also still maintain our voice and brand and point of view, so we're not like everybody else?"
Here’s the thing: that concern is well-founded—in this industry’s landscape, it’s actually incredibly easy for AI “tells” to quietly populate your content.
(See what we did there?)
The fix is grounding your AI workflows in your firm's voice, not a blank prompt. (This is something we think about constantly in the work we do together, and it matters even more when AI is in the mix).
AI can help distribute the effort more broadly across a team, especially for things like social posts, email drafts, and content repurposing.
The key to making that a repeatable, scalable process is being intentional about who owns what: who generates the first draft, who reviews for voice and accuracy, who gives final approval. When those roles are clear, AI becomes a force multiplier for your RIA’s content.
This space is moving fast, but the firms paying attention, asking the right questions, building the right guardrails, and staying curious about what's working will be in a much stronger position as AI continues to evolve.
We're in the middle of this right alongside you. We're testing, learning, interviewing, and building, and we want to bring you into that process. If you've been thinking about how AI fits into your firm's marketing (or if you've been avoiding the question entirely), this is a great time to have that conversation.