Some races are close. This one wasn't.
For 21 years, a compliance survey has asked advisory firms what keeps them up at night, and the answers usually bunch together near the top. This year one topic didn't just win, it lapped the field. That topic was AI, and the size of the gap says something useful about where your attention is worth pointing.
Three stories from this week that matter for your practice.
AI Just Became the Top Compliance Concern in the Business, by a Margin Nobody Had Seen in 21 Years.
On Wednesday, the Investment Adviser Association, ACA Group, and Yuter Compliance Consulting released their 2026 Investment Management Compliance Testing Survey, drawn from 411 investment adviser firms. AI was named the top compliance concern by 85% of respondents, up 28 points from a year ago. Cybersecurity came in a distant second at 37%, with privacy and Regulation S-P third at 35%. ACA president Carlo di Florio said no single topic had ever pulled this far ahead of everything else in the survey's 21 years. The more telling part is that firms are moving from worrying to doing. Seventy-two percent increased their AI compliance testing this year, and 86% now have an acceptable use policy, up from 64% last fall. Yet only 59% have set up a formal AI governance committee, and just 34% have mapped where their clients' nonpublic information actually lives.
Why you should care: Read those last two numbers again, because they're the opening. Most firms have named the concern but haven't built the basics behind it, and the basics are exactly what a small practice can do without a committee or a consultant. A short written policy for how you use AI, a firm rule that no client information goes into a consumer tool, and a simple list of which AI vendors touch your data. That's most of the way there, and you can write all three this month. The whole industry just agreed this matters. The careful small firm that already has its house in order is ahead on this one, and being ahead on the thing everyone suddenly cares about is a good place to stand.
The Nation's Largest RIA Went All-In on AI and Deliberately Kept the Human in Charge.
On Thursday, Mercer Advisors, the Denver firm with roughly $110 billion in assets and a run at the top of Barron's RIA rankings, launched Aspen 2.0, an operating system it describes as AI-native. It connects client data, workflows, and communications into one shared environment for its 1,100-plus professionals, mapping how clients, team members, and services relate so an advisor sees the whole picture in one place. The firm built it to run supervised AI directly inside advisor workflows. The line worth noting is where Mercer drew its own. A company spokesperson confirmed that Aspen 2.0 does not manage client portfolios or make autonomous investment decisions, keeping people in the seat where the actual calls get made.
Why you should care: The richest, most resourced RIA in the country, building about the most advanced AI system in the business, still chose to keep the human making the decisions. You can't build an Aspen, and you don't need to. What you can copy is the posture behind it. Let AI handle the coordination, the notes, the drafts, and the busywork, and keep your own judgment on anything that shapes a client's life. That's the same supervised setup a solo advisor can run today with Claude and a clear process, and it happens to be exactly what the compliance world in the first story is asking for. Keeping humans in charge is the deliberate play the leaders are making, and it's one you can run at any size.
Client Reviews Turn Out to Be Catnip for AI Search, and Most Firms Still Don't Use Them.
On Friday, Financial Planning ran a piece on how advisors can get found by AI, and one point stood out. Client testimonials carry real weight in how AI tools answer someone asking for an advisor, and most firms still aren't using them. Michael Barrasso told the story of finally convincing his father, who runs their firm, to email clients and ask what they thought. The responses came back as paragraphs of heartfelt praise, and once they went up as testimonials, the boost in AI-driven traffic showed up almost right away. He made a second point that fits the whole Amplify for Advisors message. One firm he talked with does tax planning and preparation in-house but mentioned it nowhere except a single line under services. If that's your thing, the site should say so loudly.
Why you should care: This is the encouraging flip side of the compliance story. Since the SEC updated its marketing rule, advisor testimonials are allowed when you follow the disclosure requirements, and AI answer engines clearly favor them. So there's a real opening here, and it happens to sit right in the lane compliance is watching, which means you do it carefully and you do it anyway. Ask a few happy clients what working with you has meant to them, put their words on your site with the disclosures your firm requires, and stop hiding your specialty in a list. Being specific about who you help and letting real clients say it in their own words is how a human and an AI search tool both decide you're the answer.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
The testimonials story has a first step a lot of advisors skip, which is simply asking. It feels awkward, so it never happens. Let's take the awkward out of it and draft the ask this week.
Step 1. Pick three or four clients you have a genuinely warm relationship with, the ones who would be glad you asked.
Step 2. Open Claude or Cowork and paste this, filling in your own details. "I'm a financial advisor and I want to send a short, warm email asking a few longtime clients to share what working with me has meant to them, so I can use their words as testimonials on my website. Write it in a natural, personal voice, not corporate. It should feel like a genuine request from someone who values the relationship, make it easy to say yes, give them one or two simple prompts to react to so they have an easy starting point, and keep it short. My name is [name], my firm is [firm], and the kind of clients I serve is [niche]. Do not fabricate any quotes or reviews. At the end, remind me clearly that before I publish any testimonial I collect, the SEC marketing rule requires clear and prominent disclosures placed right with it, stating that the person is a client, whether they were paid or given anything of value, and any material conflict of interest. Remind me too that paying anyone more than $1,000 in a year for a testimonial triggers a written agreement, and that my own compliance team needs to review and approve each testimonial before it goes live."
Step 3. Send it to those few clients this week. When the responses come in, that's when you loop in compliance, add the required disclosures, and put the words where a prospect and an AI tool will both find them.
If turning those replies into a website that actually sounds like you and says what you stand for is the part that stalls, that's what Amplify for Advisors is built to help with. New prompts and frameworks show up every Tuesday and Friday.
Sam Farrington, CFP®
Want the prompts and frameworks that turn this news into action for your practice? That's what Amplify for Advisors is for. New frameworks every Tuesday and Friday.
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