InvestmentNews on Caddi research: large RIAs hire for ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude, not advisor AI tools

InvestmentNews reporter Andrew Cohen covered new Caddi research on November 4, 2026, shared exclusively with the publication. The study covers the 455 largest independent wealth management RIAs ranked by SEC Form ADV assets. For each firm we read its public job postings since late 2023 and the LinkedIn profiles of its current employees, and counted whether a posting named an AI tool or asked for AI skills. No firm supplied data, and no firm is named in the report.

What the story reports

AI moved into the job description fast. In the third quarter of 2026, 19.4% of the independent RIAs that posted jobs had at least one post naming an AI tool, 39 of 201 firms. Two years earlier it was 1.1%.

The tools named are the general-purpose ones. In the 12 months to September 2026, Microsoft Copilot was named in job posts at 29 firms (up from 7 a year earlier), ChatGPT at 27 (up from 7) and Claude at 26 (up from 3). Another 35 firms asked for AI skills without naming a product. Since late 2023, the only advisor-specific AI tool among the most-named products appears at 7 firms, level with Gemini.

Size decides it. Eight of the 10 largest independents and 63.6% of firms with $25 billion to $100 billion posted at least one job naming an AI tool. The share falls to 26.5% at $10 billion to $25 billion, about one in ten at $2.5 billion to $10 billion, and zero below $2.5 billion. Asking for people who build directly on large language models is rarer still: about 21% of firms at $25 billion to $100 billion, 7.4% at $10 billion to $25 billion, and close to none below that.

The story also cites our separate survey of operations leaders at RIAs with more than $1 billion in assets, where 53% said their firm pays for an advisor notetaker.

“The largest RIAs have stopped asking whether to use AI. The question for 2027 is whether anyone can show it changed the cost of running the firm, and right now very few can.”

Alejandro Castellano, co-founder and CEO of Caddi, in InvestmentNews

Read the full story on InvestmentNews

The same research is behind Wealth Management's column on who owns AI at RIAs, which found that only 42 of the 455 firms have a named AI or innovation leader.