Mili at the Wealthies 2026: A finalist in AI Workflow Automation
New York, September 2026. Mili Office was a finalist at the Wealth Management Industry Awards in Technology Providers, Artificial Intelligence, Workflow Automation. Chirag Gandhi and Joe Holmes spent the day at Cipriani 42nd Street and at the executive sessions that ran before it. Congratulations to all the finalists and winners!
The twelfth Wealthies program drew 1,392 nominations from 508 companies, up from 1,210 the year before and close to four times the 350 submitted in the program's first year in 2015. Finalists came from 315 companies across 107 categories. Nearly 40% of the submissions covered initiatives that did not exist the year before.
What the category sheet says about the work
Artificial Intelligence carries three separate categories at the Wealthies now: Marketing and Lead Generation, Meeting Support, and Workflow Automation. Informa added Advisor Intelligence Platforms as one of seven new categories for 2026, and those seven pulled 142 nominations between them.
Informa's definition of Workflow Automation sets out what the judges were scoring: entries built to "identify bottlenecks, provide business and operational analytics, as well as reporting, financial planning and portfolio construction." Every item on that list sits in operations. An AI data extraction entry took the Document Management category. Advisor Intelligence Platforms exists as a category because firms want their own operations read back to them.
Each of those jobs has a different owner. Account opening belongs to operations. Data accuracy belongs to the client service associates. Reporting belongs to the COO. The awards score them separately because firms buy them separately.
The afternoon at Convene
The gala followed an afternoon of executive sessions at Convene 360 Madison Avenue, and the afternoon is where the operating questions got asked. David Armstrong and Erinn Ford of Osaic opened the day. A CEO panel with Shannon Spotswood of RFG Advisory, Mike LaMena of Wealthspire and Rick Kent of Merit Financial Advisors worked through the risks pressing on the RIA model and what firms want from vendors now.
The 90 minutes after that ran as executive roundtables under one title: AI's Impact on Wealth Management and the Delivery of Advice. The published topic list names five things executives sat down to compare: AI adoption, organic growth, workflow automation, cybersecurity, and technology rationalization.
Technology rationalization sitting in that list alongside AI adoption is the detail worth keeping. Firms are adding agents and cutting tools in the same budget cycle, and the question on those tables was which systems the agents make unnecessary.
The show of hands
The afternoon Think Tank, "Leaning Into the Human: Building the Advisory Firm of the Future in an AI-Driven World," took on what happens to the talent pipeline when entry-level work gets automated. Suzanne Siracuse asked the firm leaders in the room whether they had AI-enabled role-play agents in house to train new advisors. Patrick Donachie of WealthManagement.com reported the answer: most said they did not, though a few had made tentative steps.
That is a straight read on adoption depth at firms large enough to be in that room. The category sheet says AI has arrived in advisor workflows. The show of hands says most firms have applied it to client work and have barely started on their own people.
George Nichols, President and CEO of The American College of Financial Services, described what he wants built: "I hope we can create a simulator no different than we create a simulator for a 747. I would never put you in a real 747 and let you practice. But I'll let you in a simulator, and you can crash it every single day. But then I'm going to be able to teach you every single day about what you're doing right and wrong."
Kristy Archuleta, Professor of financial therapy and financial planning at the University of Georgia, put the gap plainly: "How are we ethically doing our job as fiduciaries to be able to talk to our clients when we're not training our students to do that?"
What we took from the night
Two kinds of firm filled that building. One had already handed over whole processes, account opening through to funding, client data kept current across every system, and was asking what to rationalize next. The other was still choosing a first task. Closing the distance between them is the next two years of this industry, and the category sheet is a decent map of where the work goes.
Wealth Management also introduced the Tina Powell Inspiration Award, to be given each year to someone who shows the generosity and service to others that Powell showed across two decades here. An industry that hands out 107 awards for what companies built is right to keep one for how a person carried themselves.
Thank you to David Armstrong, Shannon Rosic and the Wealth Management team for the evening, and to everyone who pulled us aside between the forums and the gala to talk about what is actually breaking in their practice.