With AI, Finance Needs To Focus On Writing Code, Not Press Releases
Justin Whitehead, CEO of Pebble Finance
The recent FutureProof Citywide conference in Miami Beach centered on artificial intelligence, with an entire AI Playground tent that included three separate stages featuring presentations, demos (some of which didn’t actually work as planned) and thousands of pre-arranged meetings. Throughout the event, we observed and participated in really thoughtful debates about the impact technology is having on wealth management.
AI isn’t just the most-talked-about thing in finance; it’s the ONLY thing people seem to be talking about. There have been big announcements lately. Anthropic, the creator of Claude, rolled out "legal" and "wealth" plugins. Altruist shipped a real tax-planning capability within Hazel that rocked the stock prices of firms like Charles Schwab and Raymond James.
So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a company as big as LPL Financial joined the buzz recently, touting a deepened relationship with Anthropic to work on AI integrations for its more than 30,000 financial advisors. But hidden in that announcement, and many others like it, are the signs of a broader industry lag in translating AI partnerships into tangible, client-facing products.
ChatGPT launched in late 2022. By the end of 2024, 90% of large public companies had already announced AI partnerships or sweeping AI transformation plans. By 2026, the market isn’t looking for more announcements… it’s expecting delivery.
In the real world, AI FOMO is translating to a lot of angst. I spoke with a number of industry leaders at FutureProof who understand the corporate posturing but aren’t on a path to getting ahead of the AI curve. Doing something…anything isn’t a plan; it’s a “hail Mary.” The large wealth enterprises that announced deals with Anthropic, IBM, etc., need to quickly shift from "We're putting the pieces in place" to "Here's the specific workflows we're transforming."
That matters because, by making a move like this, LPL put a spotlight not only on themselves, but also the entire wealth industry. In the quarters to come, Wall Street analysts are going to want to see actual workflows, adoption, measurable impact—not just “building blocks” partnerships. The same goes for all of us in the wealth space. Want to attract advisors, grow revenue and improve margin? You need to deliver use cases that meet clear KPIs, not development plans.
This all creates pressure, and, honestly, that's a good thing. Innovation happens when fires are lit, and LPL lit a big one under everybody.
But it’s got to be real, and history serves as a guide. There was a similar environment back in the 1990s, when the internet started to show its first potential in commerce, financial services and beyond. Companies fell over themselves to add a “dot-com” to the end of their name, in the hopes of generating buzz, and, more importantly, investors. That frenzy led to the biggest boom in initial public offerings in history, with even some pre-revenue startups attracting investment banks for moonshot IPOs just a few months after raising their first venture capital.
Of course, we know what happened in 2000. The minute Wall Street analysts scrutinized these stocks; it became clear that many of these companies talked a great game but had nothing to offer customers or investors. The dot-com’s bubble burst was like a game of musical chairs but one where people were circling around a dozen shares only to find them all yanked away when the music stopped.
The companies that survived weren’t the ones that talked the most about the internet. They were the ones that used it to solve real problems for real customers. Amazon didn’t win because it was an “internet company.” It won because it built a better retail experience.
The same will happen with AI. The winners from this AI transformation era will not be the firms that talk the most about AI. It’ll be the ones that focus on solving real, tangible industry pain points for advisors and their clients. Ones that have the creativity and audacity to rethink what a better investor experience could look like.
With AI in wealth management, there is a very real opportunity to improve both the quality and efficiency of the service. But it's a lot harder to do right than people imagine, especially in regulated, accuracy-sensitive environments like wealth and retail brokerage.
Big progress tends to happen when expectations are high and the clock is ticking. This year is shaping up to be a prove-it year for AI in wealth. The companies that can show, not tell, will clearly be the winners.
Justin Whitehead is founder and CEO of Pebble Finance, a portfolio analytics and technology company that synthesizes news and proprietary research, connecting the dots between real-world events and investment performance.
This post appeared in Financial Advisor Magazine.
