The Truth About AI and Wealth Management: We Have Learned the Words. Now What?
Three years of vocabulary lessons: Models. LLMs. GPTs. Claude. ChatGPT. Gemini. Version numbers that change every quarter.
You know the players. Your compliance team definitely does.
And if you’re like most RIAs, you’ve started using the tools. The notetakers. The Zocks. The Jumps. The AI features quietly appearing in software you already pay for.
Congratulations. You’re conversant.
But conversant isn’t competitive.
And it’s definitely not efficient. Not scalable.
Knowing the words doesn’t mean you’ve changed how work gets done. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the learning curve isn’t over, but it might be changing shape.
The first curve was about understanding what AI is.
The next curve is about understanding what AI can do—with your data, in your firm, under your control.
That’s a steeper climb.
Most advisors are renting AI.
Someone else’s model. Trained on someone else’s data. Optimized for someone else’s outcomes. That’s fine for transcribing meetings. It’s not fine for running your business.
The next frontier is ownership.
Not ownership of the AI itself. But ownership of how AI works with your data.
Your portfolio accounting. CRM. Your planning outputs. Custodial feeds. Your compliance records.
Right now, that data lives in silos. You spend hours ferreting out conflicts, reconciling reports, building dashboards by hand.
AI can change that.
But only if the AI actually sees your data.
Here’s what forward-thinking firms are doing:
Step one: Unify the data. Get everything into one place where it can actually be queried, analyzed, and acted upon.
Step two: Deploy AI on top of that unified data. Models that stay secure. That get smarter over time. Models you control.
Not one model for everything. Purpose-built models:
- An investment management model for research and analysis. Connected to portfolio accounting. Connected to market data. Connected to everything relevant.
- A business intelligence model for operations. One that actually understands how the firm works and helps leadership make decisions.
The firms that figure this out will have an unfair advantage.
They’ll report faster. See patterns earlier. They’ll make decisions with confidence.
The firms that don’t will keep doing what they’ve always done: manually pulling data from six systems to answer one question.
2026 is the year to move from AI user to AI operator.
Start with your data. Get it unified.Clean. Get it somewhere you can actually work with it.
Then start asking: What do I want to learn from this? What decisions could be faster? What patterns am I missing?
The vocabulary test is done.
The real learning starts now.
This is why we built Navigator.
At Milemarker, we’ve spent years helping firms unify their data. That work hasn’t changed.
What’s changed is what you can do once it’s unified.
You get the power of AI without the risk of copying client data into ChatGPT.
Your compliance team sleeps at night.
And your firm starts operating differently. Faster answers. Cleaner reporting. Decisions backed by everything you know—not just what you can remember.
But here’s the thing: Navigator might not be where you start.
Maybe you’re still figuring out what unified data even looks like for your firm. You’ve got a bigger AI vision but no clear path to get there. Maybe you just want to talk through what’s actually possible—and what’s hype.
That’s a conversation worth having.
We’re deep in this every day. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking about, what’s working, what’s not, and where you want to go.
No pitch. Just a real conversation about your plans for AI—and how to make them real.
Reply to this email. Happy to dig in.