Advisory and wealth firms
Your systems all added AI. The harder question is what you are allowed to use.
Custodians, portfolio systems, client databases and planning tools have all shipped AI features recently, and most of them arrived switched off. Meanwhile the people in your firm are already using a chatbot on their own, without anything written down about it.
That second part is the one that turns into a problem, and it is not a technology problem. It is a question of what has been decided, by whom, and whether any of it is on paper.
What the audit looks at
- What your current stack already does. The AI sitting inside the systems you already pay for, what it would actually change about a week in your office, and what is on a tier above you.
- What people are already doing on their own. Usually more than the partners think. This is worth knowing before it is worth policing.
- What is written down. Whether there is a stated position on what may be used, with what information, checked by whom. Not because a document prevents anything, but because the absence of one is what makes a routine question difficult to answer.
- Who checks the output. A tool that drafts a client note or summarizes a meeting is doing work that used to be reviewed. Whether it still is, and by whom.
- The gaps between systems. Where the same information gets typed twice because two systems that should talk do not. This is old-fashioned work, it is often the biggest thing in the document, and it has nothing to do with AI.
Why an outsider, and why a paid one
Three sources of advice are already available to you and each has a limit worth naming.
- Your custodian runs education. It is genuinely good and it is free. It is also general, and it stops short of your specific systems on your specific tiers.
- Your software vendors have opinions. They are also selling the modules. That does not make them wrong, it makes them interested.
- Your compliance consultant covers rules, not workflow. They will tell you whether something is permissible. They are not the person who watches how a review actually gets done and notices that three people re-key the same numbers.
We are paid a fixed fee, once, for an answer. That is the entire relationship, and it is why the answer can be that you should spend nothing.
We never ask for client records. The session is a screen share and nothing leaves your firm. That is not a courtesy, it is the design. Keeping an outsider away from client data keeps this out of the vendor-oversight process that makes most outside engagements slow, and it means you can book one without a committee.
What it costs
The session, the written answer, and the walkthrough call. Credited in full against any build started within 60 days.
Everything above, plus a written section on what you are permitted to use, who checks the output, and what needs to be on paper. Credited the same way.
Two to three hours of your time, a written answer inside a week, and an hour to walk through it. No hourly billing.
Firms your size almost always take the second one, because the governance section is the part that has to hold up when someone asks. It is not compulsory, and if you have that already written and reviewed, take the first and keep the difference.