85% of Advisors Call Gen AI a ‘Help’ in Rapid Shift from Skepticism to Adoption
What a difference a year makes. According to wealthtech provider Advisor360°, financial advisors are embracing generative AI (Gen AI) as a game-changing efficiency tool for everything from predictive analytics to summarizing meeting notes. Advisor360°’s research reveals that 85% of advisors call Gen AI a ‘help’ to their practice, up from 64% in 2024. Three out of four surveyed (76%) say they’ve enjoyed immediate benefits from using Gen AI-enabled tools.
“This also means paying close attention to AI vendors to ensure their use of data passes regulatory muster.”
Advisor360°’s 2025 Connected Wealth Report surveyed 300 U.S.-based financial advisors at enterprise wealth management firms to better understand their views on technology and its impact on their work. The report reveals a clear shift in advisors’ attitudes toward AI and Gen AI compared to 12 months prior.
Only 8% of advisors believe Gen AI is a potential ‘threat’ to their livelihood—a dramatic decrease from the 21% who called it a threat a year ago. And just 9% of advisors surveyed said they don’t use Gen AI tools at all.
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“Advisors are hungry for Gen AI-enabled tools that can boost their business. From administrative assistance and prospecting to predictive analytics, advisors understand that Gen AI has the potential to transform their business in ways that simply did not exist a few years ago,” said Darren Tedesco, President of Advisor360°. “The rate of Gen AI adoption in the wealth management industry is unprecedented compared to other tech advances over the last several decades.”
Firms Pursue Gen AI Policies
Wealth management firms that recognize the bottom-line benefits of AI are setting up guardrails for usage. Eighty-two percent of advisors surveyed say their firms have formal policies about Gen AI, versus just 47% in 2024.
“As with any technology, firms are on the hook to ensure that data privacy and security protocols are in place and enforced when it comes to their AI-enabled tools,” said Tedesco. “This also means paying close attention to AI vendors to ensure their use of data passes regulatory muster.”
Advisors Resist Gen AI for Financial Planning
Financial advisors say they primarily use Gen AI for predictive analytics, marketing and summarizing meeting notes. They are least likely to use it to develop personalized financial plans–just 29% of respondents indicated leveraging AI-enabled tools for this.
“Advisors prefer to be hands-on when it comes to tasks that are core to client service,” said Tedesco. “For now, using Gen AI to create financial plans appears to be a bridge too far, in part because of compliance concerns.”
Changing attitudes toward AI aside, financial advisors are ambivalent about their tech stacks overall—65% of survey respondents indicated their technology needs improvement. Bad data and a lack of integrated tools continue to dominate the list of advisors’ top technology concerns for a third year running.
Specifically, advisors are least satisfied with their firms’ current financial planning tools and digital onboarding capabilities.
Advisors also make the connection between advanced technology and their ability to win new business. More than half (57%) say they have signed new clients due to another advisor’s bad technology. Meanwhile, 85% of advisors who indicated they have “state of the art” technology say they have won clients due to a competitor’s outdated platform.
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