Financial Advisors in North America Say AI Can Help Grow Their Business, but Adoption Can Be Challenging, Accenture Research Reveals

Although the vast majority of financial advisors in North America believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform financial advice and help drive business growth, there are some challenges to overcome to accelerate adoption, according to new research from Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

The research, “AI in Wealth Management: A Financial Advisor Study,” is based on a survey of 500 licensed financial advisors in the U.S. and Canada working at major wealth managers, banks, insurers and independent wealth firms.

A key finding: Almost all (98%) of the advisors surveyed believe that AI is transforming how advice is created for, delivered to and consumed by clients, and 97% believe that AI can help grow their book of business organically by more than 20%.

However, while more than nine in 10 (92%) advisors acknowledge that their firms have taken steps to act on their AI strategies — from proof of concepts to deploying AI within targeted business units, or even scaling it across the entire organization — they also pointed to several barriers to adoption that need to be addressed.

For example, half (50%) said that their wealth management firms are challenged to act on their AI vision, 55% said that their firms’ AI tools and insights are too complicated to use, and more than six in 10 (64%) said their firm is taking on too many AI pilots at once in its push to adopt the technology.

“Against increasingly challenging market conditions, AI has the potential to help wealth managers sustain and drive new growth, create operating efficiencies and transform the customer experience through more hyper-personalized insights and products,” said Scott Reddel, who leads Accenture’s wealth management practice in North America. “Now isn’t the time to take your foot off the pedal. Firms can overcome adoption speedbumps with continued commitment from management, focused applications that deliver business value, and — perhaps most critically — collaboration across business lines.”

The need to scale and harness AI in wealth management more effectively is essential. In fact, a recent cross-industry Accenture report, “The Art of AI Maturity: Advancing from Practice to Performance,” found that the most AI-mature companies achieved 50% higher revenue growth than their peers and that the capital markets and banking industry, which includes wealth management, had the lowest AI maturity score out of 17 industries analyzed.