General AI adoption, strategy, and use in wealth management
Your AI pilot will look cheap. That is the trap. The per-task cost that looked trivial in a controlled test does not hold when you put the tool in front of your whole firm, and the gap between the two is not small. Enterprises that scaled past the pilot stage discovered the real cost only...
John O'Connell was recently quoted in Wealth Solutions Report on why integrating advisory tech stacks hasn't solved firms' data problems. According to John, integration moves data between systems, but it doesn't create intelligence across them. Tools like Zapier sync fields, not behavioral context. Take CRMs and email platforms. They were never designed to work...
John O'Connell recently wrote in WealthManagement.com about why firms keep making expensive wealth tech mistakes: every AI tool looks impressive in a controlled demo where the data is clean, the workflow is choreographed, and the edge cases your firm would actually hit never surface, so the real trap is letting the vendor set the...
John O'Connell was recently featured in Kiplinger writing about how businesses and advisory firms should budget for AI. The problem isn't whether to spend, that decision is made, it's that firms treat AI like standard software when it's actually a variable cost that tracks consumption rather than headcount, so two advisers on the same...
You signed a contract for an AI tool. The bill arrives measured in something called tokens, or credits, or messages. Last month it cost one number. This month it costs twice that. Nobody on your leadership team can tell you why. You do not need to understand the engineering to fix this. You need to understand...
John O'Connell wrote this piece for Rethinking65 on why advisors expanding their AI use should start in the back office, not with clients. According to J.D. Power's 2025 U.S. Financial Advisor Satisfaction Study, 35% of advisors identified AI as the top technology their firms should invest in, and satisfaction scores were measurably higher among...
The trust industry has been largely absent from the AI governance conversation, treated as an afterthought in frameworks designed for RIAs and broker-dealers. That absence is dangerous.
The trust industry has been largely absent from the AI governance conversation, treated as an afterthought in frameworks designed for RIAs and broker-dealers. That absence is dangerous.
The trust industry has been largely absent from the AI governance conversation, treated as an afterthought in frameworks designed for RIAs and broker-dealers. That absence is dangerous.
Independent advisors often have to build capabilities themselves through technology. John O'Connell was quoted in this article from The Daily Upside on how WealthTech innovation is increasingly becoming a pain point for financial advisors.
