The advisor’s guide to putting AI to work
Harness the power of AI to acquire clients, deepen relationships, and create more time for the work only humans can do.
How we help
Where are you along the AI adoption curve?
Vanguard’s AI advisor adoption playbook is drawn from our proprietary research, hundreds of conversations with advisors and wealth managers, and our own experience implementing AI processes across complex work.
The framework demonstrates three distinct stages of what generative AI can do—assist, augment, and automate—across key client touchpoints, such as prospecting and onboarding clients, supporting client planning, and making adjustments to portfolios. Used well, AI reduces tedious work, synthesizes and organizes information, identifies patterns, and supports more timely and personalized communication with clients. The examples below show how you can apply AI at different levels of maturity: first to assist with discrete tasks, then to augment insight and personalization, and eventually to automate repeatable workflows with appropriate oversight.
The phases of AI adoption
What stage are you in?
You’re assisting if …
You’re using AI for drafting, summarizing, and research.
You’re augmenting if …
AI helps surface insights, planning opportunities, and recommendations.
You’re automating if …
AI workflows move information, trigger tasks, and support repeatable processes under supervision.
Actions for advisors
How to use AI to assist, augment, and automate at key client interactions
Click each tab below to see actionable steps you can take to implement AI across the full spectrum of work you do with clients.
Winning new clients
For many advisors, business development gets pushed behind servicing existing clients. AI can help reclaim time by streamlining prospect research, personalizing outreach, preparing for meetings, and following up with clients—allowing advisors to spend more of their energy building meaningful relationships.
Scenario
You've received a referral from a top client or key business partner. You have one week before the introductory meeting and limited information about the prospect.
Your task
Gather enough preliminary information to make the first outreach warm, relevant, and respectful.
Use AI to:
- Arrive at the first meeting with an understanding of the prospect's professional background, potential planning needs, and personal interests—all of which will help you approach the first meeting with warmth and professionalism. Use AI to create a brief from publicly available sources.
- Develop a personalized discovery package, including an introductory email, pre-meeting questionnaire, and summary of key goals and priorities once responses are received.
- Track responses, send reminders and follow-ups, and flag any missing information before the first meeting.
Your task
Prepare for your first face-to-face meeting.
Use AI to:
- Organize the prospect’s background, referral context, stated goals, possible planning needs, and unanswered questions into a one-page meeting brief you can review before the conversation.
- Adapt your standard discovery checklist to this prospect’s situation, highlighting questions to prioritize, sensitive topics to handle carefully, and areas that may require follow-up.
Your task
Have the actual meeting.
Use AI to:
- Use meeting tools to capture the conversation, generate a transcript, and create a recap that separates goals, concerns, decisions, action items, and follow-up questions.
- Identify personal details, life events, family milestones, and future dates worth remembering, then convert them into customer relationship management (CRM) notes or follow-up reminders for later relationship-building.
- Turn meeting notes into a client-ready next-steps summary that confirms what was discussed, what the advisor will do next, what the prospect needs to provide, and when follow-up will occur.
Your task
Keep post-meeting follow-up timely, consistent, and documented.
Use AI to:
- Activate AI-enabled workflows to populate CRM records with meeting summaries, action items, key dates, and follow-up responsibilities, subject to advisor review.
- Generate a short, personalized follow-up email that thanks the prospect, confirms next steps, and lets them know when to expect a more detailed response. Review or route through approved supervision before sending.
- Automatically send emails that promise a more detailed follow-up later. Create and assign tasks to the appropriate team members, including document requests, planning analysis, scheduling, and next-contact reminders.
- Schedule reminders tied to each next step so the team can monitor progress and avoid letting early-stage opportunities go cold.
- Match the prospect’s stated interests or planning questions to approved educational content, such as retirement income, tax planning, estate planning, or portfolio construction resources.
- Monitor follow-up tasks and flag overdue items, missing information, or stalled workflows that require advisor attention.
“The future isn’t humans versus AI. The future is humans amplified by AI.”
Lauren Wilkinson, Vanguard Principal, Head of Financial Advisor Services Technology
Building the client foundation
Your prospect is now a client. Your team needs to do discovery—collect documents to understand assets and liabilities, income sources, insurance plans, family and employment profiles, and goals. This foundational work creates the profile that informs every recommendation that follows. AI can reduce manual work in this stage by organizing incoming information, identifying gaps, summarizing client communications, and allowing for cleaner inputs into planning systems.
Scenario
You need to gather their financial information, identify gaps in their plan, and build a profile that gets them to their goals.
Your task
Secure documents from clients to see their accounts.
Use AI to:
- Create a client-friendly onboarding checklist that explains what documents are needed, why each item matters, how to submit them securely, and what your team will do next.
- Draft a structured holdings inventory that prompts the client to list accounts, account types, institutions, approximate balances, beneficiaries, recurring contributions, and any assets held outside traditional investment accounts.
- Draft a welcome email that introduces the onboarding process, links to the checklist and holdings inventory, explains the expected timeline, and reassures the client that your team will guide each step.
Your task
Turn incoming documents, emails, and meeting notes into an organized early profile of the client’s financial life and planning priorities.
Use AI to:
- Summarize onboarding conversations and email chains into key themes, stated goals, concerns, decision-makers, open questions, and possible emotional drivers. Review the summary against source materials before relying on it.
- Suggest follow-up questions, missing documents, planning topics to clarify, and client communications that would help move onboarding forward.
- Compare submitted documents against the onboarding checklist and flag missing, incomplete, or inconsistent information for advisor review.
Your task
Reduce manual data entry and move verified client information into approved systems more efficiently.
Use AI to:
- Activate AI-enabled workflows to extract balances, income sources, account types, ownership details, beneficiaries, and other relevant planning data from submitted documents for review before they are added to planning systems.
- Guide the client through transfer or account-opening steps by generating required task lists, status updates, and reminders, while keeping execution within approved firm workflows and supervision.
- Automatically flag inconsistencies across documents, such as mismatched account ownership, missing beneficiary information, or balance changes that may require clarification.
“AI eliminates many administrative and computational burdens that once consumed your day, and clients will start to expect this increased speed and efficiency in their relationship with you.”
Sid Ratna,
Head of Digital and Analytics,
Vanguard Financial Advisor Services
Delivering smarter advice
Once a plan is in place, the ongoing work begins. Advisors must continuously evaluate portfolios, identify planning opportunities, monitor progress toward goals, and prepare clients for important decisions. AI can help organize information, surface opportunities, and turn complex analysis into client-friendly conversations.
Scenario
It’s time to prepare annual review meetings, and you want to connect the client’s goals, recent conversations, portfolio activity, and planning opportunities into a clear discussion.
Your task
Prepare by summarizing what happened over the past year and what still needs attention.
Ask AI to:
- Review the year’s CRM notes and separate action items into three categories: discussed, completed, and still outstanding. Have it identify who owns each next step and where advisor follow-up may be needed.
- Flag life events or household changes mentioned during the year, such as retirement timing, job changes, family milestones, health events, relocation, inheritance, charitable plans, or business transitions.
- Create a review-meeting checklist that connects the client’s goals and recent activity to open action items, and potential planning opportunities.
- Flag specific planning opportunities for advisor review, such as cash-flow needs, tax-sensitive withdrawals, Roth conversion windows, insurance gaps, estate-planning updates, concentration risks, or charitable-giving strategies.
- Prepare a meeting agenda that prioritizes the most important discussion topics, includes time for client questions, and distinguishes between review items, decisions, and follow-up actions.
- Draft a concise meeting invite email that previews the agenda, reminds the client what to bring, and frames the meeting around their goals and decisions.
Your task
Surface planning topics that may deserve attention.
Use AI to:
- Review planning records to draft a list of issues to discuss, such as withdrawal sequencing, cash-reserve sufficiency, Social Security timing, concentrated positions, required minimum distributions, tax exposure, insurance needs, or estate-planning gaps.
Your task
Explore tax optimization opportunities.
Use AI to:
- Generate first-pass planning scenarios for taxable versus IRA withdrawals, partial Roth conversions, capital-gains realization, charitable giving, and spending-rate tradeoffs, for advisor review.
Your task
Look for trends and themes within your client base.
Use AI to:
- Search CRM and planning data for client segments with shared profiles, such as pre-retirees with excess cash, retirees approaching RMD age, clients with concentrated stock positions, or households with near-term liquidity needs. (Over time, an AI-enabled workflow may help monitor these client segments and surface timely opportunities for review, outreach, or planning follow-up.)
Your task
Prepare communications materials for your client meeting.
Ask AI to:
- Produce a one-pager that highlights the value you brought to the table in the last year. Make sure it includes planning work completed, decisions supported, taxes or fees potentially reduced, behavioral coaching moments, portfolio changes, and next steps for the year ahead. (Savings on Medicare premiums? Money saved by avoiding trades during volatility?) Review carefully to ensure claims are accurate.
- Automatically segment clients by life stage, cash-flow needs, and portfolio characteristics, then generate review checklists tailored to accumulators, pre-retirees, retirees, business owners, or clients with major upcoming transitions.
Your task
Monitor portfolios for risks, drift, and rebalancing opportunities that may require advisor review.
Use AI to:
- Summarize in client-friendly terms their portfolio performance, allocation changes, and proposed adjustments, including why each recommendation may support the client’s goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon.
- Explain why a client still holds a diversified allocation during volatility, then edit to reflect the client’s prior behavior, time horizon, near-term cash needs, and risk tolerance.
“One of the biggest shifts we are about to see is how AI reshapes the entire client journey.”
Lauren Wilkinson, Vanguard Principal, Head of Financial Advisor Services Technology
The human side of advice
Some of the highest-value advisor work happens when clients are uncertain, emotional, or overwhelmed. AI can help advisors prepare for those moments by organizing client history, tailoring communications, and identifying opportunities for timely outreach. Judgment, empathy, and trust-building, however, remain distinctly human.
Scenario
A geopolitical or market shift has thrust investments into a state of turbulence. Clients are reading the news and peppering their own AI agents with questions. You’re expecting an onslaught of calls and emails. You want to be proactive.
Your task
Communicate with clients about the unfolding news in markets.
Use AI to:
- Draft segmented outreach for clients who may be most affected by the event, tailoring the message by life stage, portfolio sensitivity, time horizon, and prior behavior during volatility. Review all messaging before sending.
- Draft a short social post that reinforces disciplined investing, acknowledges uncertainty, and encourages clients to contact your team before making major portfolio decisions.
- Propose a webinar theme, title options, agenda, client segments to invite, and common questions you should address based on the market event and the concerns clients are raising.
- Summarize each client’s concern, recent portfolio activity, prior behavior during volatility, and likely questions so you can prioritize callbacks and prepare for more focused conversations.
Your task
Turn the market noise into client-ready perspective grounded in reputable sources and each client’s financial plan.
Use AI to:
- Review reputable market commentary sources that you prefer—provide the AI with names and entities you trust—and have AI produce advisor talking points that explain what happened, what it may mean, what remains uncertain, and how it connects to long-term planning principles.
- Draft a market summary that connects key news to potential effects on portfolios, asset classes, interest rates, inflation, and investor behavior, while clearly distinguishing what is known from what is still uncertain.
- Create a short “key takeaways” version for clients who want the bottom line, focusing on what happened, what it means for their plan, and what action, if any, is needed now.
- Draft a webinar outline or script that opens with client concerns, explains the market context in plain language, reinforces planning principles, and ends with specific next steps for attendees.
Your task
Translate market and portfolio insights into behavioral coaching messages for different client mindsets and life stages.
Ask AI to:
- Generate coaching language for anxious retirees, long-term accumulators, pre-retirees, concentrated-equity holders, and clients with near-term cash needs.
- Tailor the message by client type, such as accumulators focused on long-term growth, pre-retirees concerned about timing risk, and retirees focused on income stability and drawdowns.
- Personalize talking points—using client notes and portfolio data—based on the client’s goals, time horizon, cash-flow needs, portfolio risk, and prior reactions to market stress.
Your task
Continuously monitor client activity in accounts to flag any abrupt moves while also keeping an ongoing cadence of timely communications flowing.
Ask AI to:
- Activate AI-enabled workflows to send approved nudges when a client’s spending, savings, contributions, or drawdowns move outside agreed-upon parameters.
- Activate a supervised AI workflow to monitor approved news and market sources for events that may warrant client communication, then draft internal alerts or client-ready messaging for review. (An approved daily workflow could review selected market sources each morning, summarize relevant sentiment and volatility signals, and suggest which client segments may benefit from proactive outreach. The advisor or team reviews the output before any client communication is sent.)
- Trigger follow-up tasks for clients who receive volatility-related outreach but do not respond within a set timeframe.
“You’re not just adopting tools, you’re moving across a plain of value creation—and that’s where differentiation happens.”
Lauren Wilkinson, Vanguard Principal, Head of Financial Advisor Services Technology
Have questions about AI? Contact us.
Disclosures
All investing is subject to risk, including the possible loss of the money you invest.
Vanguard is not responsible for determining what's in the best interest of any underlying client on whose behalf you use this information. As an investment advisor, it remains your responsibility to make a best-interest determination for your clients, so you should review carefully the information presented and the fund's prospectus for more complete information regarding any fees, expenses, investment objectives, and risks, and make your own determination as to its appropriateness before you rely on it.
AI-generated text may not meet Vanguard's content standards and should not be interpreted as a recommendation. Please be sure to fact check all AI-generated content.
©2026 The Vanguard Group Inc. All rights reserved.