Advisors say clients pay little attention to the assistant and plenty to what follows
Clients are barely registering the AI assistants now sitting in on their planning meetings, and some are asking for the recap before their advisor has finished writing it.
Sarah Cicero, a certified financial planner at StoneBridge Advisors, told KVIA.com she expected objections when she introduced an AI assistant into client meetings and received none.
"We haven't had clients pay a whole lot of attention to it," she said, adding that she had envisioned a lot of pushback and saw neither objections nor much interest.
Her team drew consistent positive feedback on the automated summary emails that follow each meeting, Cicero told the outlet, and clients now more frequently expect a clear recap within 24 hours.
Clients have asked Kevin Christensen, founder of Aligned Financial Planning, for post-meeting items while he is still collecting his thoughts, updating his notes, and editing the recap, he said in the same report.
A December 2024 Orion survey cited by KVIA.com found 68 percent of advisors use AI for tasks including note-taking, meeting preparation, and automated documentation.
Emily Rassam, a certified financial planner and partner at Archer Investment Management, told KVIA.com that clients have started asking her team for notes or transcripts, or asking them to go back and check, because they know a record is being kept.
"I don't ever remember that happening previously," Rassam said.
Recording a client meeting engages consent obligations under federal and provincial privacy law in Canada, and any resulting transcript sits inside a firm's record-keeping and retention obligations rather than outside them.
Danielle Darling, a certified divorce financial analyst and founder of Darling Wealth Management, told KVIA.com she has seen no significant shift in expectations across her client base, and said the rise of AI has reinforced how much clients value a trusted advisor who understands their goals, concerns, and family dynamics.
Jump's 2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report found that advisors ranked highest on the firm's proprietary emotional intelligence measure improved client sentiment by an average of 17.5 percent over the course of meetings.
Advisors ranked below average improved it by 9 percent.
The measure scores four elements: talk-time discipline, open-ended questions, empathy statements, and emotional check-ins.
Top-ranked advisors gave 38.05 percent of the meeting to goals and planning and 11.42 percent to service and compliance, Jump found, while bottom-ranked advisors spent 22.66 percent on goals and planning and 27.45 percent on service and compliance.
The firm sells AI meeting software to advisors, and the dataset contains no Canadian meetings, making the behavioural patterns more transferable than the absolute figures.
Recommendations covering commodities and real assets, alternatives, crypto, and insurance drew higher acceptance when client sentiment was declining, Jump reported, while US equities, international equities, bonds, and cash saw acceptance rise alongside improving sentiment.
Jump found 48.26 percent of meetings contained at least one stated client fear and 13.59 percent contained three or more, with clients fearing an inability to pay bills showing the lowest average starting sentiment at 5.32 against an annual baseline of 6.44.
Tax planning has displaced retirement planning as the most frequent planning topic, appearing in nearly 76 percent of meetings, the report said, and meetings including it were 16 percent more likely to end with positive client sentiment.
