I recently had the opportunity to attend: Technology Innovations to Address Wealth Convergence: Trust – Wealth – Brokerage - a thought-provoking conference hosted by Fi-Tek and its partners, including AWS. The event brought together industry leaders to explore how emerging technologies are redefining the future of wealth management. Below is a summary of the session: The Future of Wealth Management: Cloud, AI, and the Path to Resilience.

The wealth management industry stands at a pivotal inflection point driven by the rapid evolution of cloud platforms, generative AI, and digital-first client expectations. The pace of technological advancement, especially in AI, has made innovation not just a competitive edge, but a requirement for survival.

Fi-Tek, alongside partners like AWS, is helping clients rethink their technology strategies - from infrastructure to intelligent automation - with a singular goal: delivering seamless, personalized, and efficient experiences for advisors and investors alike.

Major AI Trends in Wealth Management

With ChatGPT barely three years old, it’s astonishing to see the acceleration in Generative AI (GenAI). But the narrative must shift: AI is not about displacement, it’s about augmentation.

Advisors are not being replaced by machines; instead, they are being empowered to make smarter decisions faster, reduce mundane tasks, and deliver hyper-personalized service. AI can now:

• Extract and summarize client data for meeting prep in minutes, not hours.
• Predict system downtimes before they occur, preventing costly service disruptions.
• Democratize access to market research for the mass affluent segment.
• Enable agentic workflows-where AI takes iterative steps toward a defined goal, constantly learning and improving.

From Infrastructure to Intelligence: Laying the Groundwork

Before jumping into AI applications, the foundation must be solid. That means:

• Modernizing infrastructure
• Implementing strong security governance
• Ensuring data quality and access

Without this groundwork, AI initiatives will falter. It's not flashy-but resilience begins with reliable infrastructure.

Speed Is the Secret Weapon

Today’s innovation cycles are lightning-fast. Every 18 months, the speed of tech doubles. Clients can no longer afford to "wait and see." Inaction is the biggest risk.

Organizations that win will be those who:

• Leverage AI to automate and augment manual workflows
• Build resilience through automation
• Embrace "human-in-the-loop" strategies that combine AI efficiency with human oversight
• Prioritize speed-to-delivery over perfection

GenAI enables firms to train AI to leverage AI-compounding benefits over time. For instance, advisory platforms can now use AI to continuously adapt investment strategies or risk models based on market shifts in real time.

Build, Buy, Partner: Strategic Choices That Matter

Not every solution needs to be built from scratch. Knowing when to build, buy, or partner is critical.

Firms embarking on this journey must ask themselves:

• What are we best at?
• Where can we partner to accelerate?
• What can we buy to fill a gap quickly?

The goal should be to build a best-of-breed platform-one that integrates core competencies with best-in-class solutions, all under one roof. That means pulling in data from everywhere, enabling a "one-stop-shop" experience for advisors, and weaving in agentic AI to guide decisions and actions.

What Clients Are Asking

Across the board, clients are asking the same questions:

• “How do I adopt AI without compromising security?”
• “What will this mean for my advisors and operations teams?”
• “How do we start without boiling the ocean?”

The answer is: Get your data ready first. Then build up.

Have a strategy. Don’t try to solve everything. Choose key workflows to digitize and automate. Enable human oversight. Use AI where it brings the most ROI-like meeting prep, compliance, or market insights.

Above all: AI won’t replace humans, but humans who use AI will outperform those who don’t.

The Human Shift: From Manual to Cognitive

AI lets us reimagine the very nature of work.

Instead of replacing jobs, it frees humans from routine tasks and enables a shift to higher-value cognitive work. Digital workers can now:

• Operate at speeds far beyond human limits
• Provide insights instantly
• Work 24/7 across systems

The challenge and the opportunity is to train your teams to work alongside AI, not around it. Empower them to innovate, test, and fail fast in a safe, iterative environment.

Looking Ahead

The path forward is clear:

• Invest in cloud and infrastructure
• Harden security and governance
• Embrace GenAI to augment-not replace-your teams
• Build agentic workflows that can adapt and iterate
• Move fast, experiment often, and don’t wait

The firms that lead in this era will not be the biggest or the most traditional - they will be the most adaptive.

As the wealth management industry continues to evolve, Celent is closely examining how technologies like agentic AI and cloud architecture are reshaping business models, operational strategies, and client engagement. Recent research has explored how cloud platforms are enabling innovation in areas such as data orchestration, scalability, and AI-driven decision support - critical capabilities in the ongoing convergence of trust, wealth, and brokerage.

This theme is reflected in several recent Celent reports, including:

• Shedding Light on Agentic AI in Wealth Management
• Harnessing the Power of AI Agents in Wealth Management Advisor Workflows
• LPL: Next Best Action Communication Drafter

These publications offer a view into how firms are operationalizing AI and cloud capabilities to support next-generation client experiences and advisor productivity. Celent’s ongoing analysis will continue to provide objective insight into the forces reshaping the future of wealth management.