The Financial Advisor's Weekly AI Cheat Sheet — Week of May 10, 2026
By Sam Farrington, CFP®
Creator of Amplify for Advisors
Happy Mother's Day!
Anthropic launched 10 new AI agents for financial services this week, which raises a question nobody thought to ask: do AI agents have mothers? Technically, Claude does. Whether it sent flowers to Anthropic is unconfirmed.
The rest of the week: Raymond James opened an AI Academy to train its advisors on actually using these tools. Wells Fargo unveiled a $1 billion advisor platform. And a new audit found that all five major AI platforms are giving clients the same wrong answer on estate taxes.
Anthropic Just Released 10 AI Agents for Finance. Nine of Them Are for Goldman Sachs. Here's the One That's for You.
Ten ready-to-run agent templates shipped Monday for the most time-consuming work in financial services: building pitchbooks, screening KYC (Know Your Customer) files, reviewing earnings transcripts, running general ledger reconciliations, and closing the books at month-end.
Most require infrastructure a hedge fund or investment bank already has. But one translates directly to advisory work: the Meeting Preparer, which assembles client and counterparty briefs ahead of calls.
At the same time, Claude add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word launched for Microsoft 365. Context carries automatically between apps, so work that starts in a spreadsheet can end in a deck without re-explaining anything. Opus 4.7 leads the Vals AI Finance Agent benchmark at 64.37%. FactSet fell 8.1% the morning this was announced. The market understood the implication faster than most press releases did.
Why you should care: The Excel add-in is live now on any paid Claude plan. If you're already modeling client scenarios in Excel or drafting client emails in Outlook, this is a workflow change, not a product launch. That's where to start.
Raymond James Opened an AI School for Its Advisors. That May Be More Important Than Any Tool It Shipped.
Raymond James launched an AI Academy at its annual conference in Las Vegas this week: virtual training and workshops focused on AI prompting, agent productivity, and Microsoft 365 integrations. Built with Amazon Web Services, powered by Anthropic's Claude.
The firm also unveiled Client 360, a unified client service hub. CIO Andy Zolper framed the whole push around equipping advisors with practical skills, not just access to tools. The gap between advisors who know how to use these tools and those who don't is getting real, and it's widening faster than most advisors realize.
Why you should care: The firms that win with AI aren't the ones with the best tools. They're the ones whose advisors know how to use them. Worth asking what your own firm is doing here. If the answer is nothing, that's useful information.
Wells Fargo Just Spent $1 Billion Building an Advisor Desktop. Here's What 200+ Tools in One Interface Actually Looks Like.
Wells Fargo launched Advisor Gateway on May 7, the firm's modernized desktop technology. One-click access to more than 200 tools: Account 360, Client Review Center, money movement, third-party planning software, research tools, and alternatives. The newest feature is Proposal and Portfolio Analytics, powered by BlackRock's Aladdin Wealth technology. Its AI Auto Commentary capability draws on client holdings and risk analytics to synthesize complex risk exposures into structured insights ahead of client meetings. Available to independent advisors through Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, not just wirehouse reps.
Why you should care: Pre-meeting AI that synthesizes a client's risk exposures into readable prep is where the category is heading, regardless of where you custody. The Aladdin Wealth Auto Commentary feature is the one to understand. That's the bar that's moving.
The Five Biggest AI Platforms Are All Giving Clients the Wrong Estate Tax Number. Your Next Client Meeting Might Prove It.
5W and Haute Wealth tested ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot on the financial questions wealthy families actually ask: premium financing, private placement life insurance, estate liquidity, and succession planning.
The most consistent error across all five: still warning clients the estate tax exemption is about to drop to roughly $7 million per person. That sunset was permanently repealed when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became law in July 2025. The exemption is now $15 million per person, or $30 million for married couples, indexed for inflation. Sixty-six percent of AI users have sought financial advice from these tools. Eighty-five percent acted on it.
Why you should care: When a client walks in and says "I looked up our estate plan on ChatGPT," there's now a specific error you can expect: exemption guidance based on tax law that no longer exists. Knowing the actual number ($15 million per person, permanent) is the one talking point worth having ready before that conversation happens.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
The Claude for Excel add-in is free on any paid Claude plan. Go to claude.com/claude-for-excel, install it, open a client portfolio spreadsheet, and type: "Summarize the key risk concentrations in this portfolio and draft three sentences I could use to open a client review meeting."
See what it gets right and what needs fixing. That's the same context-carrying, Meeting Preparer workflow Anthropic just announced for institutional finance teams, running on your own spreadsheet, in about 10 minutes.
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.
Sam Farrington, CFP® · Creator of Amplify for Advisors
Explore more at amplifyforadvisors.ai
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