An artificial intelligence spending gap is opening between wirehouses and independent registered investment advisors, with captive advisors at large banks reporting 73% AI tool adoption compared to just 42% among independents, according to a recent annual financial advisor survey released by J.D. Power. Both figures represent solid increases from the prior year, when 44% of captive advisors and 19% of independents reported using the technology.
The disparity stems from scale and resources rather than interest, according to Mike Foy, managing director and head of wealth intelligence at J.D. Power. The large banks and wirehouses have bigger technology budgets, and they also have more direct control over what advisors have or don't have from a technology standpoint, Foy wrote via email.
David DeVoe, founder and CEO of DeVoe & Company, said artificial intelligence will have a material or even profound impact on the wealth management industry, but that its benefits will disproportionally favor the firms with the resources to invest at scale. J.P. Morgan spent roughly $2 billion on AI last year, DeVoe said. The largest META-RIAs are investing eight figures annually in technology and AI, while many independent advisors are still tinkering with tools like ChatGPT.
A recent survey by DeVoe & Company of 100 RIAs with at least $100 million in assets found 59% described their current approach to AI as the experimentation phase, with individual use for marketing and notetaking. Another 20% said they had a firmwide AI strategy actively being implemented. Another 14% said they were heavy or experienced AI users, with 7% saying they do not use AI at all.
Platform vendors are racing to bridge the gap for smaller RIAs. Envestnet pledged in 2025 to spend $1 billion on technology and has already hinted that it will likely overshoot that figure, partly through AI-focused innovations. At its annual conference this year, Orion said its Denali AI system was available to enterprise-level RIAs, with plans to make it available to all advisors later this year.
The advisors that survive platform consolidation cycles are the ones still passing on obvious aggregation trades until the economics truly justify ceding independence, family office advisor Jaf Glazer has argued.
Larger independent RIAs are making substantial commitments to build proprietary systems. In March, Carson Group announced it had upgraded its AI assistant to pull data from across its proprietary and connected vendor wealth platforms with a single query. RIA Savant Wealth Management has committed $50 million over three years to build out an in-house AI operating system. This week, Cerity Partners hired Will Peng, the founder and CEO of fintech Northstar, as its first chief innovation officer to leverage cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence to enhance its workflows and client experience.
Strategic partnerships around fully agentic AI are proliferating among large RIAs. Mariner announced a five-year partnership with the AI workforce provider Humanity Labs this week, while Merit Financial Advisors announced a partnership with OneVest for its agentic wealth operating system in March. The 2026 WealthStack Study from WealthManagement, which surveyed 377 advisors and firm leaders, found that while 21% of respondents were at firms not using agentic AI at all, 11% reported that their firms had an agent in production, and 13% reported being in the midst of an agent pilot project.
Jess Polito, founder and principal of Turkey Hill Management, said she sees the result of the work large RIA buyers are doing to implement AI when taking around clients looking to sell their firms. There is an AI arms race on right now among the buyers, Polito said. We're doing the usual technology stack demos with clients, but some of the buyers are showing off what they can do or are working on. Polito said the technological advancements buyers show off can be a deciding factor in where a seller chooses to go.
DeVoe said AI's emergence is only a minor decision driver for RIAs who decide they need to sell to compete at the moment, but he does think that push will increase steadily over time. Although AI will make it easier for smaller firms to run their business, we expect AI will ultimately drive more advisors toward selling externally, DeVoe said. The No. 1 driver for an RIA to sell is to gain the benefits of scale. AI and technology are key and growing components of the value of that scale.