General AI adoption, strategy, and use in wealth management
John O’Connell was recently published in Kiplinger, the third in his series on AI concentration risk, laying out four risks that could break the assumption holding up the AI buildout: that today’s spending gets paid back by tomorrow’s revenue. The four are demand risk, with the gap between AI spending and revenue running around...
John O’Connell was recently a guest on the Modern Financial Advisor Podcast, joining host Mike Langford to lay out where wealth management firms actually stand on AI adoption. He opens with a story that should make every compliance officer sit up: a firm turned on Microsoft Copilot, connected it to SharePoint, and assumed its...
A loop has five parts. Skip one and you do not get a slower loop. You get a system that burns tokens on a dead end, or one that silently produces the wrong answer with total confidence. Understanding what each part does, and then building one yourself, takes less time than most firms spend debating...
Access The Oasis Group's AI WealthTech Map, a resource that financial advisors and wealth management firms can use to find leading artificial intelligence solutions and AI-focused firms serving the wealth management industry. The map follows the lifecycle of a wealth management relationship and is organized into 8 categories, identifying and categorizing 106 leading technology firms.
John O'Connell was recently published in PowerAdvice on what Schwab and Robinhood are really building. Schwab is industrializing the personalized client relationship, pushing AI-generated portfolio commentary to the millions of sub-$1M clients who don't qualify for a human relationship manager, while Robinhood is building infrastructure that captures the client either way, through live agentic...
You signed a contract for an AI feature priced like software has always been priced: one fee, one number, adjusted once a year at renewal. That assumption is now wrong, and the vendor you signed with knows it before you do. Per-seat licensing worked because the marginal cost of one more login stayed close to zero....
John O'Connell was recently featured in Wealth Solutions Report where he discussed a new legal risk from AI notetakers. The notetaker in your client meetings isn't a passive tool, it's a third party recording people who may never have agreed to be recorded. A federal judge in the Otter.ai privacy litigation let the core...
Most loop failures are not loop-design failures. They are model-capability failures wearing a design problem's clothes. Your termination logic was sound, your goal was testable, your spine tracked state correctly, and the loop still drifted, because the model running inside it could not sustain coherent reasoning across the number of cycles the task required. Claude...
John O'Connell was recently published in Kiplinger on why most firms miscalculate AI ROI. His argument is that the vendor's token bill is just the tip of the iceberg, and the costs that actually decide whether AI pays off never appear on that invoice. There are three: review, because every output reaching a client...
John O'Connell was recently published in Advisor Perspectives on the AI-washing problem in WealthTech. Just as greenwashing described managers marketing ESG claims they couldn't back up, AI washing describes vendors relabeling rules-based automation as AI to justify premium pricing, and the market is now flooded with claims of wildly varying credibility. His single most...
