RIAs Using AI Increase Hiring and Advisor Productivity

With the avalanche of AI hype, product launches and announcements I’m constantly buried by, it is refreshing to receive analysis and data that reflects actual usage and grounds me back into some semblance of reality.

Such analysis arrived this week in the inaugural 2026 RIA Market Monitor report from the startup AI infrastructure provider Astraeus, which was produced in partnership with Alois Pirker, longtime industry analyst and founder of his own consultancy and research firm Pirker Partners.

Among its findings are that wealth management firms with the highest rates of artificial intelligence adoption are hiring more employees and generating greater advisor productivity than their peers.

Keep in mind that for now those hires tend to be more on the operational side than advisors but that still flies in the face of the notion that AI is going to reduce headcount across the industry.

The research came out of the analysis of 6,384 Form ADV filings from independent registered investment advisors and found firms that disclosed AI use increased total headcount by 15% between April 2025 and April 2026, compared with 8% growth among firms without AI disclosures.

Related:A Lingua Franca for Advisors on AI

Specifically, the analysis paired narrative evidence from Part 2A brochures with structured business metrics from Part 1A (regulatory assets under management, client counts and types, employee composition and service offerings).

In this way and with strong correlations, Astraeus and Pirker were able to find which firms are adopting AI, as well as what they say they are using it for and what risks they emphasize.

“We love that it broadly dispels this widespread talk of displacement in the industry,” said Jon Stevenson, co-founder and president of Astraeus. “And we fully acknowledge that this is just a baseline of apples to apples across the industry but this is going to be a cool thing to build on.”

Stevens said that while it took some time to iron out the filters needed to limit the firms to independent RIAs (the full dataset had more than 20,000 companies), among many other more subtle aspects and nuances, the work gives them a repeatable dataset to build upon in future years.

“Analyzing unstructured data is something AI does very well and this is going to be a good benchmark for them to keep monitoring,” said Pirker. “While it takes both a bit of art and a bit of science, I think they have put a stable measure in place to allow for comparability in the years to come.”

For me, the most interesting finding was that only 6% of independent RIAs disclosed AI use in their March 2026 ADV filings, though those firms collectively manage approximately 11% of industry assets under management, according to the report.

Related:WealthStack Roundup: Astraeus Launches AI Platform for Advisory Firms

The research also found that firms disclosing AI adoption demonstrated assets under management per advisor that increased by 22% between April 2025 and April 2026, compared with 12% among comparable firms without AI disclosures.

Sure, there could be many factors at play to explain these findings, but that leaves room for plenty more analysis and research.

Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly half of the firms using AI identified applications related to administrative efficiency, including meeting summaries and document generation, while only 4% reported using AI as a direct input to investment decisions.

As I pointed out in another recent column, despite the seemingly unending hype, we remain in the early days of widespread AI use, especially with agentic AI.

In our own research, while 87% of respondents in the 2026 WealthStack Study (a product of Wealth Management’s research unit, WMIQ) reported using or piloting some type of AI tool, which runs the gamut from freely available web-based querying from ChatGPT or Google Gemini to tools they purchased, those results came from a survey, not an SEC regulatory disclosure.

And when it came to the far more complex rollout of agentic AI; our finding was that only 16% of the 377 respondents surveyed for our study indicated they had already deployed agents in production environments (our survey covered a range of firms, including RIAs and independent broker/dealers, was completed in April 2026, and was conducted in partnership with SS&C Black Diamond and Docupace).

The far more sophisticated analysis of a much larger dataset from Astraeus just reinforces how early we are and that we are just beginning to see adoption among larger RIA firms that stand to benefit the most from earlier experimentation and adoption of this technology.

“The form ADV data is probably understating the use of AI right now,” Pirker said.

“I think there is a lot more work going on but the larger firms are probably more diligent in documenting it and those are the firms shaping their own destiny with the methods that get them the farthest in scale and it is the enterprise [firms] that are above $5 billion [in AUM] and have arrived at a significant amount of pain operationally who stand to benefit most,” he said.

There is much more analysis, data and charts to be found in this 17-page report that make it well worth a read for those seeking insights into usage of AI by independent RIAs. Use this link to download the report free from Astraeus (registration required).