Federated Hermes just published its 2026 RIA and Independent Advisor Survey — 300 advisors, each overseeing at least $25 million in client assets, now in the survey’s sixth year. The headline finding isn’t about portfolios or markets. It’s about technology: for nearly half of advisors, the top business concern is making better use of technology to reach more clients or engage them more meaningfully.

And AI has clearly crossed from experiment to expectation. 56% of advisors view AI as an opportunity for their practice; only 8% see it as a threat. 70% believe AI will improve the overall efficiency of their practice — up from 62% last year. 61% expect it to free up more time for client engagement or business development.

But here’s the part that should interest you more than any of those numbers: where the wins are actually happening.

The wins are all operations wins

Among advisors already using AI, the reported productivity benefits are:

  • improved meeting follow-up
  • more complete documentation
  • better capture of action items
  • expanded advisor capacity

Read that list again. Meeting follow-up. Documentation. Action items. Those aren’t AI achievements — those are operations achievements. AI didn’t invent follow-up; it just made it harder to skip. The technology is doing the discipline the practice wasn’t doing on its own.

That’s the real story of this survey. The advisors getting value from AI aren’t the ones with the cleverest prompts — they’re the ones pointing the tool at the most basic, most neglected processes in their practice. The wins aren’t coming from AI as a strategist or an analyst. They’re coming from AI as a very diligent operations assistant.

The trap: AI multiplies whatever you point it at

There’s a trap here, and it’s worth naming plainly. AI accelerates whatever it touches. Point it at a documented follow-up process and you get consistency. Point it at chaos and you get chaos at machine speed — summaries of meetings nobody reads, action items nobody owns, documentation nobody can find.

The tool doesn’t create discipline. It multiplies whatever discipline is already there. Zero times anything is still zero.

This is why “AI strategy” is a misleading phrase for most practices. You don’t have an AI problem. You have a workflow problem that AI happens to be good at solving — if the workflow exists.

What this means for your practice

The survey’s message is optimistic, and it should be. But the optimism belongs to operations, not technology. Here’s how to earn it:

  • Document the process before you automate it. Write down what happens after every client meeting — who writes the summary, where it goes, who owns the follow-up, by when. One page. If you can’t write it down, AI can’t execute it.
  • Point AI at the bottleneck, not the novelty. The survey says advisors want AI for client engagement and business development. The boring truth: start with meeting notes and follow-up. That’s where the hours go, and it’s where the survey’s winners are winning.
  • Assign ownership to every automated output. An AI-generated action item with no owner is the same as no action item. The workflow needs a name next to every task — human or machine.
  • Measure the before and after. Pick one metric — follow-up completion rate, hours from meeting to summary sent — and track it. The firms that win with AI will be the ones that can prove it worked, not the ones that bought the most tools.

The advisors winning with AI aren’t early adopters. They’re the ones who finally got serious about the unglamorous machinery: follow-up, documentation, action items. AI just made the machinery run faster. Build the machine first. The costume is optional.

Source: Federated Hermes 2026 RIA and Independent Advisor Survey (300 advisors, $25M+ AUM each), announced September 22, 2026.