From the Ocean Stage to the Sand: Mili at Future Proof 2026

What changed at our booth

A year ago the conversations at our booth were about meeting documentation. Advisors wanted the notes handled, and that was most of what they asked about.

This year they arrived with work to hand over. The week ran on agentic runs. A run is a piece of work an advisor gives to an agent and gets back finished. Fill this custodial form. Model what happens if the client retires at 65. Build the firm-branded proposal for Thursday. Find the planning opportunities sitting in this household. Advisors brought their own client scenarios and we ran them on the spot.

The people who stayed longest were the ones who pulled up a chair after the putt.

AI stopped being a track

The read was the same from every direction. AI was in the sessions and on the floor, and the question had moved. Firms arrived asking how to run the business on AI. A year ago they were asking where AI could sit alongside the work that already existed.

Future Proof had built the agenda for that. Five themes, the first of them The AI-Native RIA. The format moved with it. RIA Braintrust put about 30 executives in a room to work a shared problem. Show & Tell had executives walk the room through the operational systems they actually run. A Tech & AI Hub ran live demos through the week. Matt Middleton, who founded Future Proof, described the fifth year as a reset point for the event.

Show & Tell is the detail worth keeping. A conference that puts executives on stage to demonstrate their own back office has decided the interesting part of AI is now operational.

The problem got named as back office

Day one on the Ocean Stage brought the launch of an advisor product from one of the general-purpose AI labs, with a custodian and several asset managers named alongside it.

Shirl Penney, founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners, asked the room how many advisors joined this industry to spend "80%-plus of your work week on middle and back-office" work. Charlie Rocco, CEO of Moneco Advisors, was in the audience and told InvestmentNews what he wanted out of it: "the ability to, in natural language, query and update all the various systems that we have."

Query and update. Those are verbs about systems of record, and they match what advisors were putting in front of us.

Kevin Knull, CEO of TaxStatus, gave the sharpest line of the week: "AI doesn't matter if you don't have good data. As much as people are so focused on which AI model they're using and how they're using it, they really need to start with the data first, because if you're using AI on top of bad data, it magnifies the problem."

The research agrees with him. F2 Strategy surveyed 40 firms holding $8.6 trillion in May 2026 and found 64% without the unified data infrastructure AI needs. Cerulli surveyed 68 RIAs in May and June 2026 and scored the group at 32 out of 100 on AI maturity. Vanguard released an advisor survey at the festival, fielded in July 2026 across 549 advisors: 38% use AI to draft emails, 35% for research, 27% for meeting notes, and 72% want more time for prospecting and client relationships.

Most firms have handed over the writing and kept the operations.

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Breakthru, the sand, and the happy hour

The Breakthru meetings were where the detail came out. Two dozen of them, each one a firm walking through what its week actually looks like.

They also involved a lot of walking. Finding your table among hundreds of them, on sand, in a crowd, was the running complaint of the festival, and we heard it from nearly everyone who sat down. Good conversations either way.

The happy hour was the best part of the week. Advisors came off a long day in the sun, picked up a glass of wine, worked through the charcuterie, and told us how their days go when nobody is presenting. Some of the best talk of the festival happened in that room.

The festival itself stayed generous. Sun the whole way through with enough shade to stand in, and somebody brought puppies onto the floor, which pulled a crowd the size of a session.

Thanks to the Future Proof team, and to everyone who came by, sat down for a Breakthru meeting, or stopped by our booth. Until next time.

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