The Truth About AI and Wealth Management: We Have Learned the Words. Now What?

On Wednesday, we launched Navigator AI. From my vantage point, it’s our biggest and best product release yet.

Then my phone exploded.

Not with work.

With Spotify Wrapped.

This year’s Wrapped didn’t just tell you your top artist or the song you played 143 times while insisting you “never overplay music.”

No. This year, Spotify tried something new.

It guessed your age.

And let me tell you… it turned group chats into war zones.

Spotify guessed my age exactly.

My wife? Off by two decades.

One of our friends, 10 years younger than me, came in at 92.

Hilarious. But also revealing.

Because this is AI today. Sometimes eerily accurate. Sometimes as confident as it is wrong.

Everyone is trying to figure out what AI really knows. What it assumes and why. Where it helps. Where it hallucinates. And where the line is between magic and mess.

So this week, that’s where we’re going.

But first—a moment to celebrate.

Kyle Van Pelt won Thought Leader of the Year at the ThinkAdvisor Luminary Awards. Milemarker CTO, Kailash Duriaswami, won CTO of the Year.

Two Luminaries. One team.

Congrats guys. Proud to work alongside you.

All right. Let’s dive in.

Three years of vocabulary lessons: Models. LLMs. GPTs. Claude. ChatGPT. Gemini. Version numbers that change every quarter.

You know the players. Your compliance team definitely does.

And if you’re like most RIAs, you’ve started using the tools. The notetakers. The Zocks. The Jumps. The AI features quietly appearing in software you already pay for.

Congratulations. You’re conversant.

But conversant isn’t competitive.

And it’s definitely not efficient. Not scalable.

Knowing the words doesn’t mean you’ve changed how work gets done. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the learning curve isn’t over, but it might be changing shape.

The first curve was about understanding what AI is.

The next curve is about understanding what AI can do—with your data, in your firm, under your control.

That’s a steeper climb.

Most advisors are renting AI.

Someone else’s model. Trained on someone else’s data. Optimized for someone else’s outcomes. That’s fine for transcribing meetings. It’s not fine for running your business.

The next frontier is ownership.

Not ownership of the AI itself. But ownership of how AI works with your data.

Your portfolio accounting. Your CRM. Your planning outputs. Your custodial feeds. Your compliance records.

Right now, that data lives in silos. You spend hours ferreting out conflicts, reconciling reports, building dashboards by hand.

AI can change that.

But only if the AI actually sees your data.

Here’s what forward-thinking firms are doing:

Step one: Unify the data. Get everything into one place where it can actually be queried, analyzed, and acted upon.

Step two: Deploy AI on top of that unified data. Models that stay secure. Models that get smarter over time. Models you control.

Not one model for everything. Purpose-built models:

• An investment management model for research and analysis. Connected to portfolio accounting. Connected to market data. Connected to everything relevant.

• A business intelligence model for operations. One that actually understands how the firm works and helps leadership make decisions.

The firms that figure this out will have an unfair advantage.

They’ll report faster. They’ll see patterns earlier. They’ll make decisions with confidence.

The firms that don’t will keep doing what they’ve always done: manually pulling data from six systems to answer one question.

2026 is the year to move from AI user to AI operator.

Start with your data. Get it unified. Get it clean. Get it somewhere you can actually work with it.

Then start asking: What do I want to learn from this? What decisions could be faster? What patterns am I missing?

The vocabulary test is done.

The real learning starts now.

This is why we built Navigator.

At Milemarker, we’ve spent years helping firms unify their data. That work hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is what you can do once it’s unified.

You get the power of AI without the risk of copying client data into ChatGPT.

Your compliance team sleeps at night.

And your firm starts operating differently. Faster answers. Cleaner reporting. Decisions backed by everything you know—not just what you can remember.

But here’s the thing: Navigator might not be where you start.

Maybe you’re still figuring out what unified data even looks like for your firm. Maybe you’ve got a bigger AI vision but no clear path to get there. Maybe you just want to talk through what’s actually possible—and what’s hype.

That’s a conversation worth having.

We’re deep in this every day. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking about, what’s working, what’s not, and where you want to go.

No pitch. Just a real conversation about your plans for AI—and how to make them real.

Reply to this email. Happy to dig in.

______________________

Join us for a live walkthrough.

We’ll show you how “Which clients grew AUM fastest this quarter?” gets answered in seconds—not days. No SQL. No IT tickets. No client data leaving your environment.

What you’ll see:

• Live Navigator demo

• How AI runs entirely inside your Snowflake environment (zero data exposure)

• Self-service analytics for advisors and ops teams

• Real results: 75% reduction in reporting time, 90% fewer manual data requests

• Your 30-day roadmap to get started

Featuring Kailash Duraiswami (our CTO) and me, moderated by Jessica Perez.

1. December 15-16 – Carmel, IN

If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.

Jud Mackrill