From instinct to insight to action: How AI drives growth in wealth management

The keys to success in wealth management are no secret. Research and experience confirm that it comes down to understanding your clients, recognizing their needs (sometimes better than they do), and helping them reach their goals with effective guidance and investment strategies. The formula might seem simple, but it’s not easy.

Instinct has always played an essential role. A great advisor has a feel for people as well as markets, with an innate ability to match the two. In the digital world, however, instinct alone can no longer ensure success, particularly as the scope and scale of advice expands. AI is evolving in ways that don’t just make advisors more efficient but also more proficient in a broad range of critical competencies. The arrival of agentic AI promises to help advisors work smarter and serve clients more personally and comprehensively than ever before.

Empowering financial institutions to achieve more with advanced AI and cloud technologies is our primary goal with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, which provides tailored solutions built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and supported by our global partner ecosystem. In wealth management, we are helping innovative firms improve client retention, revenue growth, and profitability.

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

As the financial landscape shifts and client preferences change, AI is creating an opportunity for wealth managers to innovate differentiated client experiences. This will be powered by three things:

The explosion of data from a firm’s own digital activities plus an ever-expanding universe of new information sources.
The power of AI to reason over huge volumes of data, identify patterns, and unlock insights.
A new breed of AI agents that will assemble data and orchestrate activities to accomplish entire processes.

How Microsoft 365 Copilot improves advisor effectiveness and success

Financial services firms are already gauging the transformative impact of generative AI. For example, IDC reports that 62% of firms in the securities and investment services sector have seen generative AI already disrupt their business, start to disrupt their business, or expect it to impact their business significantly within the next 18 months.¹

A powerful example of the value of generative AI is Microsoft 365 Copilot, which in its first eight months delivered broad productivity gains, with 70% of users surveyed across industries reporting it made them more productive and better able to focus on high-value activities.²

For many advisors, the impact of Copilot becomes obvious in the Microsoft Teams experience. Firms commonly use virtual meeting solutions that integrate call recording and transcription capabilities, but Teams with Copilot takes this to another level. In addition to familiar features like summarizing calls and capturing notes in customer relationship management (CRM), it brings essential context from documents and emails. Thanks to a Microsoft 365 feature called Microsoft Graph, which links data across emails, documents, calendars, and more, Copilot expands the power of AI to the full scope of information within the firm.

To illustrate the value this can deliver, consider this example. An advisor named Matt gets an email from his client, Jane, whose mother has decided to move into assisted living for reasons including health and companionship. Matt uses Copilot to gather the context he needs to advise Jane on possible next steps. He asks Copilot to find content related to Jane’s email and receives the following: a power of attorney (POA) document Jane has on file for her mother, an article entitled “Caring for aging parents,” and a meeting transcript where Jane expresses concern about her mother’s estate plan.

Armed with this context, Matt can act quickly to help Jane. He prompts Copilot as follows:

Draft an email response to Jane offering our help as her mother makes the transition to assisted living. Use a supportive and sympathetic tone. Summarize relevant key recommendations re: transitioning into assisted living from our “Caring for aging parents” article. Attach a copy of the POA we have on file and ask if any other family members should be added. Reference the most recent time Jane mentioned her mother’s estate plan and offer to introduce her to our estate planning colleague Joe. Suggest a time to meet ASAP.

In response, Copilot generates a draft email for Matt, pulling from data sources across the firm. Matt can revise it to make it appropriately personal and send it with confidence that the references and resources are complete and correct.

The benefits here go beyond additional productivity gains to empowering advisors in new ways. They can now take advantage of all of the firm’s data (as allowed by policy) to conduct research, generate ideas, and produce documents. It’s like having a super-assistant who knows every available resource, offers insights and ideas, and delivers workable artifacts—literally in seconds.

Beyond Copilot: Agentic AI can orchestrate action at scale

Agentic AI is poised to take this experience to the next level. AI agents are specialized AI tools that can work autonomously on behalf of a user or another system to perform specific tasks or solve business challenges. An agent can orchestrate a mix of AI components and tools—including other agents—to ensure smooth collaboration and task handoff. This enables the automation of processes, while adhering to predefined guidelines and guardrails.

Triggered by business events, an AI agent can collect and analyze relevant data to either act directly or recommend actions. It’s like a virtual team manager or facilitator who can assess situations, make decisions, and lead a group of assistants to achieve a goal.

For example, if you wanted to schedule your participation in a series of industry events, generative AI could suggest a plan and recommend steps. Agentic AI, by contrast, could execute that plan for you by finding available dates and times on external sites, registering you as required, navigating conflicts, and scheduling the meetings on your calendar—even consulting you along the way if you prefer.

In wealth management, agentic AI can help firms handle a wide range of important tasks, such as proactive portfolio management or driving complex workflows for onboarding or other key processes. Over time, agentic AI also holds the potential to help advisors deliver hyper-personalized client service.

To see how this could work, let’s return to the example of Jane and her mother. It’s easy to imagine a series of “practice management” agents that could help Matt deliver highly personalized support for Jane as her mother transitions to assisted living. The agents could use data from Microsoft 365 and a variety of external sources.

For instance, as Jane gains control of her mother’s finances, she sends Matt a statement from one of her mother’s investment accounts, which Matt’s firm does not manage. The practice management agent sees the attachment in Jane’s email, extracts details from the statement, and collaborates with a data or research provider to understand the asset mix, risk profile, and other attributes. Matt can then enlist the agent for tasks such as evaluating the account, offering recommendations based on the new circumstances, and crafting ongoing communications with Jane. This also opens the opportunity to potentially move the assets under the management of Matt’s firm.

When it’s this easy to assess and respond to complex life events, advisors can engage clients on an array of new topics. Expanding the scope of advice in this hyper-personalized way paves the way for asset growth, improved retention, increased referrals, and higher returns.

How to get started

To realize the full potential of generative AI benefits and set the stage for innovation with agentic AI, wealth management firms should consider making the following available for everyone in the organization:

Microsoft 365 Copilot on every desktop.
Microsoft Teams for all client communications.
A knowledge bank of specific Copilot prompts to help educate users.
A strategy for agentic AI innovation built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, focused on high impact use cases.

Learn more

Meet Copilot, your AI assistant for work, by visiting Microsoft 365 Copilot.
To learn more about how Microsoft empowers financial services organizations to achieve more, visit Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.
To learn how your organization can adopt AI, start by engaging with your Microsoft representative or service provider, or get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.