Headcount Went Up

The question I get more than any other: if we implement AI, does that remove the need for roles and bring headcount down?

No. A study published last week read the Form ADV filings of 6,384 RIAs, and the firms furthest into AI grew headcount almost twice as fast as everyone else. What this buys a firm isn’t a smaller payroll. It’s hours back, and those hours go into more clients, more projects, and better service for the book you already have. That’s the memo below.

Before it, something you can do this week: your ten biggest competitors have already published their fee schedules, and you can get through all ten in an afternoon.

This is the second issue of AI Under Management. It runs every other week for people at wealth and asset management firms who want real work out of this without creating a problem for themselves. If you know someone who’d want it, send it their way.

BUILD THIS

Read Ten Competitors’ ADVs in an Afternoon

Every SEC-registered adviser files a Form ADV Part 2A brochure, and every one is public at adviserinfo.sec.gov. Fee schedules, breakpoints, minimums, the services a firm actually promises, every conflict it discloses. Almost nobody reads them. The ones who do read one, right after losing a deal, and never go back.

So pick the ten firms you lose to most often and save their brochures. You’ll download the PDFs yourself, since the SEC’s search runs as an app rather than a page you can hand over a link to, though plenty of firms post theirs on their own site. Call it fifteen minutes.

Feed them in three or four at a time and have it build one table as it goes: fee schedule and breakpoints, minimum, services promised, investment process, disclosed conflicts.

Then start asking questions, which is where it gets useful. Where does our fee sit in this group on a two million dollar relationship? On ten million? Which of them promises something we already do but never say out loud? What is every single one disclosing that we don’t?

Nothing here needs clearing. These are public filings, nothing from your book goes in, and no connector is required. People get bored four brochures deep. Machines don’t.

One thing to know going in. This works on independent RIA brochures, which run twenty-five to forty pages with the fee table sitting right there in Item 5. It doesn’t work on the big institutional ones, which run past a hundred and forty pages and park the fee schedule in an appendix marked available on request. Check the date on each one too.

Then read your own, last, after the other ten. You’ll see it the way a prospect does.

THE MEMO

Headcount Went Up

It sits underneath every AI conversation I have at a wealth management firm, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.

So here is the most useful number I’ve read this quarter. Astraeus and Pirker Partners read the Form ADV filings of 6,384 independent RIAs. The firms that disclosed using AI grew headcount 15% between April 2025 and April 2026. Everyone else grew 8%.

Among enterprise and large RIAs, assets under management per advisor rose 22% over the same year, against 12% at comparable firms that hadn’t disclosed.

More assets per advisor, and more advisors. Both at once.

Two caveats before that goes on a slide. It’s correlation, not proof. Firms that formalize AI tend to be firms with the kind of operating discipline that shows up in growth numbers regardless. And disclosure tracks size: 16% among RIAs running five to twenty-five billion, 7% at mid-sized firms, 5% at the smallest.

Still, the direction is hard to wave off, and it runs the opposite way from the fear.

Where the hours came from

It helps to know where this is actually paying off, because it isn’t where the headlines point. Only 4% of those firms reported using AI as a direct input into investment decisions. Nearly half identified applications tied to administrative efficiency: meeting summaries, document generation, workflow, CRM updates.

So the work being absorbed is the work nobody wanted in the first place. The prep. The assembly. The reformatting. The second draft. The thing you rebuild every quarter because last quarter’s version is buried in somebody’s downloads folder.

Nobody is handing over the investment decision, and the firms with the best numbers aren’t trying to.

Which explains the headcount number rather than contradicting it. Free up a day a week across a firm and you haven’t created a reason to let anyone go. You’ve created capacity, and capacity in this business gets spent on more relationships per advisor and more advisors to hold them.

What the growing firms did differently

The obvious question is what separates that group from everyone else, and it isn’t access to the tool. Schwab surveyed 533 advisors last autumn and 63% said they were using AI. Six percent of firms disclose it in a filing. Those measure different things, a survey against a filing, so the gap isn’t precise. It’s far too wide to be an artifact. Almost everybody has this. Very few have made it official.

That’s the difference. Not the model, not the subscription. Whether anyone owns it.

What owning it looks like is unglamorous. One person accountable. A written line on what data can go in and what can’t. Approved connections instead of copying and pasting. And anything your people build getting shared across the firm rather than sitting in one person’s account.

That last one is where the compounding is, and it’s where most firms lose it. Somebody works out a genuinely good way to handle a recurring task and it stays theirs. Nobody else ever gets it. When they’re out, the firm goes back to the old way, and when they leave, it goes with them.

Last issue was about getting permission to point this at client data. This is the other half of the same problem. Permission with nobody accountable for it just means everyone waits a little more politely.

The firms in that 6% didn’t get a better tool than the one you already have. They decided out loud that it was going to be a way the firm works rather than a thing some people do. Then they went and hired.

ASKED THIS WEEK

Who Can See What

If we connect Claude to our portfolio system, can people see accounts they shouldn’t?

No. A connector doesn’t grant access, it borrows yours. It authenticates as the person using it and carries the permissions of the source system with it. If you can’t open a household in the portfolio system, you can’t reach it through Claude either. Same for the CRM, the document store and email.

So the access question was settled when your roles were set. Connecting Claude doesn’t reopen it and doesn’t flatten it.

One thing to confirm if a system in your stack has no connector of its own and somebody builds you one: it should sign in as each person rather than under a single shared key. Built that way it inherits the roles you already have, exactly like the rest. That’s a question for whoever builds it, not a question about Claude.

If you’ve got a question you want answered here, just reply.

WHAT MOVED

Two Stories Worth Your Time

Your notetaker is making records somebody has to keep

Archive Intel and Zocks announced an integration on September 2 that routes AI-generated meeting transcripts and notes into an archiving platform, screens them against SEC and FINRA communication rules, and holds them for audit retrieval. Twelve dollars per user per month. The number underneath it is the interesting part: InvestmentNews cites the most recent T3 software survey putting notetaker utilization between 44% and 52% across the memberships of the FPA, NAPFA and other advisor groups.

My take: call it something close to half, and what a notetaker produces is a client communication like any other. Most firms added the notetaker without ever deciding where its transcripts land. One question for your next compliance meeting: is that output being captured, and by whom? A shrug is an answer, and it’s cheaper to fix now than to explain later.

Read The Coverage

Another all-in-one AI platform launched for independent advisers

WealthAi launched WealthAi for Advisors on September 3, pitched at independent and smaller advice firms. It bundles meeting notes, an AI-native client file, CRM, document generation, form filling and compliance monitoring, and says summer beta firms cut routine client administration by 60% with deployment in days rather than a system replacement.

My take: the 60% comes from the vendor’s own beta, so treat it as a claim rather than a finding. The useful question for any all-in-one is where the client record actually lives once it’s in there, who at your firm can produce it on request, and how it gets out if you leave. Ask that before the demo, not after.

Read The Coverage

That’s issue two. The next one lands in two weeks.

If it was useful, forward it to whoever at your firm is going to get handed the AI question.

And if you want to talk about what this looks like at your firm, in your workflows, on your timeline, just reply.

Tim COO, Bridge AI Consulting bridgeaiconsulting.com

This is general information about published rules, not legal or compliance advice, and nothing here creates an advisory or attorney-client relationship. Run your own facts past your own counsel and CCO.