Built for the Relentless: How Orion Ascent 2026 showed us exactly what today's advisors are building toward

‍San Diego Bay, 2,000 advisors, and four days that made one thing clear: the firms growing fastest are the ones that refuse to let manual work slow them down.

Orion Ascent 2026 had one word running through everything: Relentless. It was the conference theme, Tim Grover's keynote, and honestly, the best description of the advisors we spent four days with at the San Diego Marriott Marquis. These are people who show up every day for their clients with an intensity that does not switch off. The best technology they can find is the technology that matches that energy.

Vennela Miryala, our CPO, took the Stage to walk through how firms are extending Redtail with AI agents to grow client capacity. We were on the floor the whole time, talking to advisors, hearing what their days actually look like, and showing what Mili does about it.

‍San Diego Bay as a Backdrop Does Something to a Conference

There is a reason Ascent keeps growing. The San Diego Marriott Marquis overlooks the bay, and this year Orion took that setting seriously. Select panels and roundtables were held outdoors overlooking the marina. Conversations that might have felt formal inside a ballroom took on a different quality with open air and water in the background. People talk differently when the setting invites it.

With 2,000 advisors, asset managers, fintech providers, and firm leaders in attendance, Ascent is one of the few wealth management events that genuinely feels like an industry gathering. The energy on the floor reflected that. Advisors were moving between sessions with purpose, the kind of pace you see when people are getting real value from what they are hearing.

The role-based Community Groups, back for a second year after strong feedback in 2025, brought COOs, CTOs, CCOs, and CIOs into curated roundtables built around their specific challenges. These were not panel discussions with a moderator and a clock. They were peer conversations, the kind where people share what is actually working and what is not. For a conference of this size, that intimacy is hard to create. Orion pulled it off.

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Redtail plus AI agents: What that actually unlocks

Vennela's session on the Pop Up Stage focused on something specific: what happens when you extend Redtail with AI agents across the full advisor workflow.

Redtail is already where a lot of advisor workflow lives. Client records, interaction history, tasks, notes. But right now, getting information into Redtail and keeping it accurate requires someone to put it there. After every meeting, someone updates the contact record. After every life event, someone edits the data. After every call, someone logs the interaction. That work adds up fast across a full book of business.

Mili's agents change that equation. The Meeting Agent captures every client conversation in real time, without recording, and pushes the update directly into Redtail with one click. The Data Management Agent keeps client information consistent across the full stack the moment something changes. The Scheduling Agent handles the coordination that used to live in email chains.

The result is an advisor who walks into every client meeting already prepared, walks out with nothing left to file or update, and spends their full attention on the relationship. That is a different kind of practice.

Kiosk 18 and the conversations that matter

We spent most of the conference at Kiosk doing what we like best: sitting with advisors and hearing how their days actually look.

Ascent draws a specific kind of advisor. Seventeen of the top 20 Barron's RIA firms run on Orion. Nearly a third of all RIAs over one billion in AUM are Orion clients. The people walking the floor are not exploring whether to take technology seriously. They are refining how.

What came through in conversation after conversation was the same pattern. Advisors who had their CRM, their planning software, their custodian, their calendar, all running well individually, but still spending significant time being the connector between all of them. Manually moving information from one system to another. Filling in the gaps that the tools leave between them.

That is exactly the space Mili is built for. Connecting tools, and handling the work that falls in between.

‍Growing client capacity without adding headcount

One of the clearest themes across the sessions at Ascent was capacity. Orion's own data showed that their clients achieved organic asset growth nearly 10 percent higher than their peers last year. These are firms that want to serve more clients well, and they are looking for ways to do it without the cost of a one-to-one headcount increase.

Mili's agents are built around that exact goal. Each agent handles a complete workflow so that advisors and their teams can take on more without working more hours.

The Prospect Research Agent delivers comprehensive background before every prospect meeting automatically, so advisors walk in prepared to build rapport from the first minute.

The Onboarding Agent auto-populates account applications, beneficiary forms, and transfer paperwork from a single client profile, compressing weeks into days.

The Meeting Agent captures every client interaction in real time, updates Redtail automatically, and has follow-up emails drafted and ready before the advisor has left the room.

Together, these agents give an advisor the capacity to serve a larger book with better consistency. That is the growth lever that scales.

‍S'mores, 90s pop, and what we are taking home

Ascent closed the way it should: s'mores, great conversations, and peak 90s nostalgia courtesy of the POP 2000 Tour at The Rady Shell. Chris Kirkpatrick, LFO, Ryan Cabrera, O-Town, and a crowd of wealth management professionals who clearly had no trouble remembering every word. It was the right kind of ending for a conference built around community.

What we are taking home is sharper than a conference summary. It is a clearer picture of what the relentless advisor actually needs: tools that handle the work that should not require a human, so they can give everything to the work that does.

The momentum from Ascent is real. The advisors we met in San Diego are ready to build practices that operate at a different level. We are ready to help them get there.

Thank you to the Orion team for an exceptional four days. Already looking forward to what comes next.

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