As AI reshapes wealth management, driving efficiency and innovation, human soft skills are now at a premium: Insights from a new survey of executives at 500 investment firms worldwide

The AI revolution is well underway in the wealth and asset management industry, according to a new study by ThoughtLab, a global thought leadership and research firm. Based on a recent survey of top executives at 500 investment firms in major markets worldwide, the study shows that nearly three-quarters believe that AI is critical for the future of their businesses.

Indeed, most executives say that AI’s new abilities to act and think like humans — and perform tasks autonomously — will galvanise all parts of the value chain for their firms. Client interaction will become more effective, as AI makes experiences more efficient, personalised, and seamless. Advisers will better optimise client portfolios through AI-enhanced data analysis. AI’s benefits will flow throughout the organisation as it relieves employees of repetitive tasks, allowing them to handle a higher order of work.

Investment firms have made significant strides in adopting AI from the back to the front office. “Strategic integration of AI across investment management, customer engagement, and operations helps us drive performance and innovation,” wrote the chief operating officer of a UK insurance firm quoted in the survey.

AI automation of back office functions — such as code development, business processes, and custody services — can yield enormous efficiency and productivity gains. Investment providers also harness AI in the middle office to automate compliance checks, or detect and respond to anomalies in real time, boosting data security and privacy. They use these same AI abilities to identify and head off fraudulent transactions.

AI has likewise elevated front office activities with clients. Nearly six out of 10 firms now use AI to deepen customer analysis. Slightly fewer offer AI-enabled chatbots and self-service portals to provide clients with 24/7 personalised support. Almost half leverage AI to create highly-customised products for individual clients.

Using advanced AI technologies

So far, most firms’ efforts have centred on earlier generations of AI, such as machine learning, to automate specific, pre-defined tasks, and natural language processing to power chatbots. More recently, more than a third of wealth and asset management firms have embraced GenAI.

Many are deploying GenAI to enhance the experience and capabilities of investment advisers and financial planners. One adviser interviewed for the study says that GenAI saves his team up to 15 hours each week by automating meeting notes, handling compliance procedures, entering customer relationship management system updates, and drafting follow-up emails to clients. AI-enabled automation frees advisers to focus on the human elements of their role, increasing the importance of skills such as empathy, listening, and emotional support, which clients value highly.

Beyond GenAI, firms plan to accelerate their adoption of the next wave of AI technologies over the coming three years, with usage more than doubling for some. These include explainable AI, to make AI decisions more transparent, and agentic AI, to take on tasks humans formerly handled. This new crop of AI innovations gives firms the tools to make a step-change in their transformation strategies.

Ready to dive into the report and discover more about ThoughtLab’s article? You can read and download the report online here.

Obstacles to AI adoption

Although wealth and asset management leadership teams understand AI’s potential, the study found formidable organisational, technological, and regulatory hurdles that limit successful AI transformation. Conservative cultures can act as an invisible wall to AI adoption — and to hiring the AI talent firms need.

Most investment firms are also struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovation. Their data is often fragmented, inconsistent, unreliable, and not AI-ready. Meanwhile, operational complexity and inadequate system and workflow integration prevent them optimising and scaling AI innovation.

Driving AI innovation is particularly challenging in the highly-regulated investment industry. Unfortunately, AI regulation is still a work in progress: firms face unclear and shifting guidelines, causing them to move cautiously on AI adoption, rather than embracing full-fledged AI transformation.

Data integrity, security and privacy are also critical concerns, given the sensitivity of financial information and the sums of money involved. Missteps in these areas can be extremely costly, eroding client trust, damaging a firm’s reputation, and exposing it to regulatory action.

Partly due to these hurdles, over two-thirds of firms are currently generating only small or moderate ROI on AI; 12 percent are seeing no or negative returns. Many management teams find that delivering hefty returns from AI takes time and money. With an average payback period of 22 months, achieving high ROI can take three years or more.

Following the leaders

The ThoughtLab study found an elite cadre of wealth and asset management firms that are well ahead in AI transformation, offering a successful roadmap for others to follow.

These ‘leaders’ scored highly on five key best practices:

• Creating an AI vision and culture to inspire change
• Building an AI-ready IT and data platform
• Installing a robust AI governance, risk, and regulatory framework
• Preparing for the future of work with the right talent and skills
• Rethinking business for the agentic era by embracing advanced AI

Leaders take concrete steps to implement these best practices, mapping out strategies aligned with business goals, and laying the organisational, cultural, talent, and technology foundations for AI success. They also put in place the governance and risk management guardrails needed.

As a result, leaders are further ahead in implementing AI across their organisations — particularly generative and agentic AI. Almost half currently use GenAI for risk management and fraud protection. Robinhood, for one, developed a generative AI solution to help its team investigate suspicious activity that might indicate money laundering or fraud.

And leaders get better returns on their AI investments, averaging 4.7 percent, versus 3.1 percent for others. Indeed, 37 percent of leaders report large positive returns from their AI investment, versus 15 percent of others.

What lies ahead

For the future, investment management firms expect AI to rewrite how people and machines get work done across organisations. Over the next three years, some of the most exciting AI advances will occur in the front and middle offices. More than a third plan to use GenAI for tasks from customer analysis and self-service portals to regulatory monitoring and fraud protection.

Forward-looking firms will step up with agentic AI, particularly insurance firms and universal banks. RBC, for example, is using advanced AI technology to automatically make trades in a client’s best interest based on what it has learned from prior transactions.

The back office, which still handles many repetitive tasks manually, remains ripe for AI transformation. Among surveyed firms, three-quarters or more plan to employ AI for custodial services, asset valuation, trade processing and reconciliation.

“We are using AI to automate back office operations to help improve service levels for complex customer requests. The ROI we are seeing currently is about 15 percent,” reported the CEO of a large US universal bank’s asset management division.

As firms accelerate their adoption of these technologies, AI’s role will increasingly converge with the work of people in client and investment activities. AI models and agents will work with humans on key client activities, such as onboarding, administration, and communication.

As a result of these developments, close to threequarters of investment firms believe that AI will fundamentally change the nature of work for their staffs and advisers — triggering a big boost in human productivity. At the same time, firms say the technology will create new roles in areas like AI oversight and product development, refocusing staff and advisers on value-added activities.

The study found that AI is likely to play a bigger role than people in more straightforward activities, such as executing transactions, allocating assets, and compliance. In other, more nuanced areas, such as risk management, investment advice, and portfolio management, AI and humans will increasingly work hand-in-hand.

Humans will, naturally, continue to dominate in areas such as relationship management. Consequently, nearly two-thirds of executives predict they will hire staff with soft skills that AI cannot easily replace, such as emotional intelligence and creative thinking.

As the chief technology officer of a German asset management firm argued in the survey: “We found that AI definitely helps and saves time, but I believe AI cannot replace human judgment in complex investment decisions.”

Interested in reading the Future View Toolkit 2025? You can read and download the report online here.

About the Future View Toolkit 2025

The Future View Toolkit 2025 focuses on the ways in which the wealth management industry across the world is future-proofing itself amid technological change, increasing compliance demands, advanced client expectations, and new operational models.

It features contributions from a total of nine industry participants, all bringing different perspectives to the challenges and opportunities that come with the future-proofing of this sector. Among these are six contributors from technology vendors, who have each contributed a topic-focused Showcase profiling an individal solution.

Our broader Toolkit Report Series covers thematic, geography and wealth manager segment-focused reports, each tasked with delving into the topics and supporting technologies of relevance to help wealth managers of all types better understand how they should bring technology into their business and in which areas.

Next in the series, we are looking at the US Registered Investment Advisor market in our US RIA Toolkit – discover more here

About The Wealth Mosaic

The Wealth Mosaic is a UK-headquartered online solution provider directory and knowledge resource, focused specifically on the wealth management industry.

For wealth managers, the buy side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic is designed to enable discovery of key solutions, solution providers and knowledge resources by specific business needs.

For solution providers and vendors, the sell side of our marketplace, The Wealth Mosaic exists to support the positioning, exposure and business development needs of these firms in a more complex and demanding market.

For more information, visit: www.thewealthmosaic.com

Discover our latest reports!

• Future View Toolkit 2025 – read here
• UK Toolkit 2025 – read here
• European WealthTech Landscape Report 2025 – read here
• AI Toolkit 2025 – read here
• Client Experience Toolkit 2024 – read here

Join our community and follow us on LinkedIn here.