The New Standard: How the RIA Technology and Practice Management Summit 2026 confirmed that AI agents are now a core part of how advisory firms run

‍New York, February 2026. 100+ senior RIA executives spent a full day working through one question: what does it actually look like when AI handles the full advisor workflow?

Portfolio Summits launched the inaugural RIA Technology and Practice Management Summit on February 11 at One Liberty Plaza in New York. Over 100 senior executives from independent RIA firms, each managing at least $100 million in AUM, spent a full day on practice management, technology adoption, and operational efficiency. CTOs, COOs, operations directors, firm founders. The people who build and run these firms at the highest level.

Chirag Gandhi, our CEO, and Joe Holmes, our Head of Sales, were on the floor for a live demo. And what we saw and heard across the day gave us a clear picture of where the most sophisticated RIA firms are heading.

The hidden cost in every advisory practice

Most advisory firms today have a well-built tech stack. A CRM. A financial planning tool. A custodian platform. A calendar. Often an email system and a document vault on top of that. Each one does its job reasonably well. The problem is what happens between them.

The advisor is the connector. After every meeting, someone manually moves the notes into the CRM. After every life event, someone updates the data across multiple systems. Before every client conversation, someone pulls information from four different places to build a picture of where things stand. That work is not visible on any report. It does not show up as a line item. But it is happening every day, across every advisor, across every client service associate, and it adds up to a significant portion of the working week.

The firms at this summit know this problem well. They have the most sophisticated stacks in the RIA world, and they are still dealing with it. Which is exactly why the conversation around AI agents landed the way it did.

What the Full Workflow Actually Looks Like in Practice

The live demo used a fictional new prospect: Taylor Swift. The choice was deliberate. A client with complex assets, multiple income streams, an estate structure requiring serious planning, and a partner, Travis Kelce, whose financial picture adds another layer. If the agents could handle this, they could handle anything.

The Prospect Research Agent pulled a full background on Taylor automatically before the first meeting: business affiliations, financial disclosures, interests, and a fit score calibrated to the firm's ideal client profile. Thirty minutes of manual searching, done before the advisor has finished their coffee.

Taylor's team then sent over documents ahead of the proposal meeting: portfolio positions, financials from her holding company, beneficiary details from the estate plan. The Documents Agent parsed all of it and surfaced what was relevant. One click synced the updates into the CRM. The Data Management Agent kept everything consistent across every connected system simultaneously.

Meeting prep ran live on stage. Mili pulled from account history, prior notes, planning data, and recent emails to generate a full agenda: key discussion points, open questions, what had changed, what the client cared about, and the planning opportunities worth surfacing. A personalised one-page intro deck was ready to download. A timer was running. Total time: two minutes and forty-one seconds.

After the meeting, the Meeting Agent had captured everything in real time with no recording and no bot on the call. Follow-up email drafted in the advisor's tone and style. Notes logged to the CRM in one click. Every task from the conversation created, assigned, and prioritised. Client data updated across both the CRM and financial planning software at once. Taylor had mentioned wanting an introduction to the estate planning team. Mili drafted that coordination email with the relevant context already attached.

From prospect to prepared advisor to completed post-meeting workflow. Every step handled. Nothing falling through.

What 25 more clients per advisor looks like

Mike Bard at Sum Planning has taken on 25 more clients per advisor since deploying Mili. The hours that used to go into moving information between client conversations and the tech stack are now handled by agents. The advisors are doing the same number of meetings. They are just not spending the time before and after each one being the connector.

That is the practical outcome of what the demo showed. Not a productivity hack. A different way of running a practice, where the technology actually works together and the advisor's time goes to the work that requires them specifically.

A room full of people ready to move

Stefan Ludlow, Partner and Chief Technology Officer at Cerity Partners. Rohan Kalyanpur, Director and Chief Technology Officer at Silvercrest Asset Management Group. Allen Eickelberg, Chief Operating Officer at Bogart Wealth. Michael Banchick, Chief Technology Officer at Winthrop Wealth. Brian Taylor, Director of Engineering at The Mather Group.

These are the people who have already made the investment in their technology infrastructure. The demo resonated with them precisely because they recognise the problem. They have the CRM. They have the planning software. They have the custodian. What they are still dealing with is everything that falls between those systems.

The conversations after the demo were practical and specific. How does this work across a team of advisors who all run meetings differently? How long does setup actually take? Those are the questions of firms that have made their decision and are working through the details.

Thank you to Portfolio Summits for putting together a genuinely sharp room and for having Mili as part of the inaugural event.

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