Artificial intelligence has become the loudest conversation in wealth management.
Walk any conference floor, and you’ll hear the same questions repeated over and over: Which AI tools matter? Which ones are real? And which ones are just another tech hype cycle waiting to deflate?
The real opportunity isn’t autonomous advice or robo-advisors 2.0. It’s something far more practical: removing the tedious manual work that sits between a client conversation and the delivery of advice.
In this Action! Q&A, Hardeman explains why workflow automation – not autonomous advice – is where AI is delivering the most value today, and how firms can adopt the technology without getting lost in the hype.
Suleman Din: Advisors are being flooded with AI tools right now. From your vantage point, what looks real – and what looks like hype?
Jim Hardeman: What we focus on is the manual work that prevents advisors from spending time with clients, marketing their practice or doing deeper analysis.
If you look at the advisor workflow – from prospecting to onboarding a client to building proposals – there are an incredible number of manual steps. Advisors are constantly re-keying data, moving information between systems and dealing with duplicate records across platforms.
Those gaps between tools create friction in the workflow. From our perspective, that’s low-hanging fruit for AI.
One obvious example is meeting note-taking. It’s a pain point because advisors often write notes during the meeting and then retype them into another system later. That’s not just inefficient – it also interferes with the conversation. Advisors are trying to maintain eye contact and stay engaged while also documenting everything.
Automated note-taking solves both problems. Advisors have better conversations with clients, and the documentation gets handled automatically.
More broadly, a lot of what you see in AI today is replacing analog processes with automated ones – things like replying to emails, filling out forms, doing research or moving data from a conversation into a CRM or financial planning system.
Our focus is simple: how do you reduce the time from a great conversation to great advice?
Din: For advisors who are just starting with AI, where should they begin?
Hardeman: The first thing is governance. Firms need to have clear AI policies and understand where their data is going – how it’s processed and where it’s stored.
That’s why working with a purpose-built vendor that understands the regulatory environment is important.
Without that structure, advisors often go rogue. They sign up for AI tools on their own using personal email accounts, and suddenly, sensitive client data is moving through systems the firm doesn’t control.
So firms need to embrace AI and implement policies rather than try to block it.
From there, start small. Tools like note-taking are easy entry points because they immediately save time. But it’s important to pick a platform with a roadmap so you can expand over time.
Many firms begin with automated notes, then move into CRM updates, meeting preparation and eventually automated data entry into planning tools. It becomes a progression – crawl, walk, run.
Advisors who have been using platforms like ours for a year have really dialed it into their playbooks and customized it to their practices.
Din: Wealth management has seen tech hype cycles before – robo-advice being one example. Are we seeing similar dynamics with AI?
Hardeman: In some ways, yes. But the pace of innovation here is extraordinary.
Even two or three years ago, nobody expected AI to accelerate this quickly. Today, we’re seeing capabilities that people wouldn’t have imagined a year ago.
That speed is driving a lot of experimentation across the industry.
But if you ask what’s real today, it’s the low-hanging fruit – the obvious replacements for manual processes.
We’re still a ways away from fully automated advice or autonomous decision-making. The groundwork is being laid, but there are significant regulatory and compliance considerations before anything like that becomes mainstream.
You can envision a future where agentic AI systems run multi-stage workflows on behalf of advisors. But right now, the practical value is in assisting humans, not replacing them.
Din: Some critics say AI tools are already going too far. People joke about joining meetings where eight note-takers show up. What’s your view?
Hardeman: Our philosophy is very clear: AI is meant to help the advisor, not replace them. Think of it as a co-pilot or sidekick.
The advisor is still the one leading the conversation and building the relationship with the client. The technology is in place to capture information, automate tasks, and accelerate follow-up.
If an advisor didn’t show up to a meeting and only sent the AI note-taker, it simply wouldn’t work.
The human relationship is still at the center of wealth management. AI just helps remove the administrative friction.
Din: What other processes are you automating?
Hardeman: One of the areas we recently expanded into is document intelligence.
We started with meetings, whether they’re virtual, in-person conversations or phone calls. Then we added email interactions because not every conversation happens in real time. The next logical step was documents.
Advisors receive a huge number of documents from clients during the onboarding process: tax returns, bank and portfolio statements and account paperwork. When onboarding a new client, they might drop a stack of files that an advisor has to read through, analyze and manually enter into various systems.
Now those documents can be uploaded and analyzed automatically. The system extracts the key data and pushes it into the CRM or financial planning tools. Again, it comes back to the same question: how do we reduce the time between a great client conversation and delivering great advice? The more steps you remove from that process, the more time advisors can spend doing what they do best.
Din: What’s next for your platform?
Hardeman: The big area of focus for Zocks in 2026 is adding proactive automation to the platform to help advisors find and act on organic growth opportunities in their book of business. This is already in beta with several of our lighthouse customers.
Advisors can ask Zocks’ natural language questions, and we can search across our client profiles, past conversations, emails, and connected systems to surface opportunities. As an example, an advisor asked, "How many of my clients don't have enough life insurance to cover their mortgage?" Zocks found 26 matches, and 13 of those clients responded to his outreach and took action to address the gaps.
You can imagine all the questions you could search for regarding RMDs, clients with kids but no education funds, portfolios with large cash concentrations, clients with held-away assets, clients who had children in the last year, and more that would unlock new planning opportunities and AUM.