Five Things We Heard at Our First Future Proof

After our first Future Proof, we've had a few days to sit with hundreds of conversations, ranging from compliance officers to tech leaders to traders. A few themes kept surfacing, again and again, across every kind of firm and every kind of role. 

1. The age of the AI notetaker is ending. Teams want more. 

The initial panacea of time savings from AI notetakers was real, but it wasn't transformative. Once every advisor had a tool quietly writing meeting summaries, the question shifted from “does this save me time” to “what else can it do.” That pressure is now showing up in the product roadmaps themselves. Craig Iskowitz, CEO of the Ezra Group, put it bluntly in a recent newsletter: “Notetakers are becoming agentic operating systems that want to run everything in your business. They're expanding into proposal generation, compliance, financial planning and workflows. They're becoming CRM.” Ezra Group's own 2026 Strategic Buyers Guide goes further, concluding the standalone AI notetaker category “will not exist in its current form by 2028.” At the same time, CRMs are pushing the other direction, with a wave of “AI-native” CRMs building notetaking and workflow automation directly into the system of record. Either way, the two categories are colliding. 

Sources: Family Wealth Report | InvestmentNews 

2. There's real trepidation about one system seeing everything. 

Every advisor we spoke with wants less tool-switching. However, security, privacy, and risk concerns rise fast as a tool's access widens. In a 2026 survey of financial services security and compliance professionals, data leakage was the single dominant AI security concern, cited by 61% of respondents, ahead of model attacks, prompt injection, or any other threat category. That tracks with what we heard directly. As one RIA technology director told Family Wealth Report earlier this year, “It makes me nervous to put an AI agent in a computer and let it run wild.” Privacy, obfuscation and security rapidly become key concerns.  

Sources: Cloud Security Alliance | Family Wealth Report 

3. Cost, budget, and the fear of capture. 

Token usage came up constantly, and not just as a line item. Ramp's own transaction data shows average monthly AI token spend across its customers up 13x since January 2025. Nutanix's 2026 Enterprise Cloud Index found financial services firms wrestling with soaring token costs even as they keep increasing AI spend. More cataclysmic was the worry about dependency: if your workflow is fully underpinned by someone else's model, what happens to that workflow the day they change the price, or the terms, or shut off access entirely. Eventually the other shoe will drop, is the overwhelming sentiment.  

Source: Nutanix 

4. Reporting, reporting, reporting. 

This one never goes away. It's still cumbersome, still hard to customize, and still leaves clients wanting more. Orion research found that 57% of advisors cite a lack of integration between their core applications as their single biggest technology pain point, and reporting sits right at the center of that. Morningstar's research shows the gap from the other side: 72% of investors want reports that are easy to understand, yet 64% of advisors cite communicating their value to clients as a major pain point. Spanning multiple systems just to build one report a client will actually read is still one of the most common frustrations in the industry, and it came up in nearly every conversation we had. 

Sources: Orion | Morningstar 

5. The advisor crunch is real, and the math doesn't work. 

The average financial advisor in the US is about 56 years old, and Cerulli Associates projects nearly 40% of today's advisors will retire within the next decade. There are only so many hours in a day to serve clients, and firms are already making hard calls about who gets attention and who doesn't. Systems, automation, and workflows aren't a nice-to-have against that backdrop. There is a huge opportunity coming, and everyone can see it: the driving factor behind decisions is what will help you realize it?  

Source: Forbes / Cerulli 

The thread running through all five 

Reporting kept coming back to the same root problem: how to build better materials for clients when the data those materials depend on is scattered across systems that don't talk to each other. Every firm we spoke with is solving some version of that same question. 

It's part of why we built WealthIris the way we did. Not as another system advisors have to trust with everything, but as a layer that answers questions and raises alerts from the systems firms already run, without asking them to hand over the keys to a single black box. The concerns we heard this week, about access, about cost, about being locked into someone else's pricing, are the right concerns to have. They're also exactly the ones we designed around.