Why it's good — and why everyone needs to keep their head on a swivel.

Wednesday morning I was driving into Orlando when I got a call from an industry reporter looking for a scoop on an AI and a custodian working together.

This was coming off of Altruist's announcement of their Hazel-driven agentic solution that immediately turned heads and dropped share prices at the establishment custodians.

Even if I had a scoop, I’m careful to never comment when the news isn’t mine to share. I do, however, always enjoy catching up.

That phone call confirmed something I've been feeling for months.

This week, Matt Shumer, CEO of HyperWrite, published "Something Big Is Happening". It went viral — 75 million views in days. His argument is simple: the gap between what AI can actually do right now and what most people think it can do has gotten dangerously wide.

He put it perfectly: "I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind."

I felt that in my bones. I've been doing the same thing — speaking carefully about it at every conference, every call, every dinner. So let me stop.

The Polite Version Is Over

If your firm doesn't have a clear path to operating with AI in your workflow by the end of this year, you will spend 2027 feeling like you can't catch up.

That's not hyperbole. That's the trajectory.

Altruist didn't just launch a feature. They made a statement. The establishment custodians felt it immediately — not in their product roadmaps, but in their stock price. That kind of wake-up call gets boardrooms moving.

Shumer used a COVID analogy that's hard to shake. Think back to February 2020. Everything was normal. Stock market humming. Kids in school. Then three weeks later, the entire world rearranged itself. He writes: "I think we're in the 'this seems overblown' phase of something much, much bigger than Covid."

That's the speed we're operating at now. And this time, we know that it won’t be a temporary change.

Before you say "I tried AI and it wasn't that great" — Shumer addresses that head on. Judging AI based on a free-tier experience from 2024 is like evaluating smartphones by using a flip phone. The models today are unrecognizable from six months ago. The gap between public perception and current reality is actually enormous.

In our industry, that gap is where firms are going to get blindsided.

Here's what this looks like in wealth management right now:

• An advisor feeds a messy household portfolio into AI and gets a rebalancing recommendation — with tax-loss harvesting flagged — in minutes instead of days.

• A compliance team runs AI across their ADV filings and catches inconsistencies that would've taken a junior analyst more than a week to unearth.

• A firm surfaces patterns across their entire book and identifies cross-selling opportunities they've not been able to see before.

None of this is theoretical. It's happening today at firms that stopped waiting.

But AI Is Only as Good as the Data Underneath It

Here's what most people are missing: this isn't just about AI. It's about putting the technology you already have to work.

Most firms are sitting on a mountain of tools and data they barely use. The AI layer is powerful — but it's only as good as the infrastructure underneath it. Fragmented data across fifteen systems with no connective tissue? An AI copilot isn't going to save you. It's going to hallucinate on bad data and make you feel productive while you're standing still.

The firms that win in 2026 aren't the ones that bolt on the flashiest AI feature. They're the ones that get their data house in order first.

The Security Problem Nobody's Talking About

Here's the part nobody in the AI hype cycle is addressing.

Most advisors can't do what Shumer describes. Not yet. Not safely.

He tells people to feed AI a messy spreadsheet. Paste in quarterly data. Let it find the story. Great advice — if you're a tech founder working with your own data.

But if you're an RIA with a fiduciary obligation and client PII everywhere? You can't just drop a client portfolio into ChatGPT and hope for the best. Your compliance team would — and should — lose their minds.

Most off-the-shelf AI tools aren't built for regulated industries. When you type a prompt into a general-purpose chatbot, that data leaves your environment. It goes somewhere. For an advisor handling sensitive client information, "somewhere" isn't good enough.

This is the gap keeping most firms on the sideline. Not a lack of interest in AI. A lack of trust that it can be deployed securely.

That's why my team built what we built. Our AI sits on top of your data lake environment. The data is already there. Already governed. Already within your security perimeter. It doesn't leave. It doesn't get trained on for broader use. It doesn't go beyond the container it operates in.

This containerization gives your compliance team what they actually need to greenlight AI adoption. Not as an experiment. As infrastructure.

Because the goal isn't just to use AI. It's to use it in a way where you can look your clients and your regulators in the eye and say: this is secure, this is compliant, and this is how we deliver better outcomes.

Competition Makes Us All Better

Before anyone reads this as doom and gloom for the incumbents — this arms race is a good thing.

Custodians compete on technology. Advisors win. Platforms race to deliver better integrations. Firms win. Clients win.

That's the whole game.

Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing aren't going to sit still while Altruist grabs headlines. They're going to respond. They're going to invest. They're going to ship. Every one of those moves benefits the advisor in the chair trying to serve their clients better.

The worst thing that could happen to wealth management technology is a comfortable oligopoly where nobody feels pressure to innovate. We had that for years. It wasn't great.

Shumer tells a story about a managing partner at a major law firm who spends hours every day using AI. Says it's like having a team of associates available instantly. He's not using it because it's a toy. He's using it because it works. And he expects it'll do most of what he does before long. That's a managing partner with decades of experience.

Now apply that same lens to our industry.

When I see Altruist swing big with Hazel, I don't see a threat. I see a spark. The custodians that lean in will come out stronger. The ones that dismiss it will get left behind. The advisors in the middle become the beneficiaries of a technology war where the real winner is the end client.

Is Your Tech Stack Bound for Extinction?

Every firm leader should be asking: is the technology I'm building on going somewhere — or slowly dying in plain sight?

Not every platform makes it through this next cycle. Some of the tools you rely on today are already on life support. You just can't see it yet.

Three questions to find out.

Is it being updated regularly? Not a press release twice a year announcing a "refreshed UI." Real updates. New capabilities. New integrations. A consistent shipping cadence. If your platform's release notes look like a ghost town, that's your signal. A platform going somewhere builds. A platform going nowhere maintains. If the last meaningful update was six months ago, you have your answer.

Is it being actively led? Does the team have a vision or are they just keeping the lights on? Is there someone out front casting vision and making bets? Or has it gone quiet — multiple ownership changes, no clear direction, nobody you can point to who's driving the ship? Pay attention to the silence.

Does it have its head in the ground on integration, automation, or AI? This is a big one. If your vendors don’t value integration outside of themselves forcing manual workarounds for things that should be automated — you have a problem. A platform going somewhere connects to everything and automates the repetitive stuff. A platform that’s going extinct wants you to export a CSV and upload it somewhere else.

The hard truth: switching costs feel high until you realize the cost of staying is higher.

What to Do This Week

Shumer's piece resonated because he didn't just sound the alarm. He told people what to do. Same energy:

1. Audit your integrations. Map every system. Find where data flows automatically versus where someone is manually moving it between platforms. Every manual handoff is a liability. Know where they are.

2. Put AI on a real problem. Not a toy problem. A real one. A portfolio review. A compliance question. A client communication. Use the paid model — not the free version, not a quick Google-style question. Give it context and data. See what comes back. As Shumer writes: "The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours."

   And check your ego. The managing partner at that law firm isn't too proud to use AI. He's doing it because he's senior enough to understand what's at stake.

3. Ask your vendors the hard questions. What's on their AI roadmap? When was their last major integration release? What are they shipping in the next 90 days? Vague answers tell you everything.

4. Get your team in the room. Block one hour. Show them what's possible. The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't the technology. It's that the team hasn't seen what it can do on their actual work. One hour of hands-on exposure beats a year of reading about it.

5. Set a 90-day checkpoint. The pace of change means quarterly reviews aren't enough. Set a date. Reassess your stack, your AI adoption, your competitive position. If you're not materially further along, something needs to change.

Keep Your Head on a Swivel

New partnerships. New product launches. New competitive dynamics. Weekly, not quarterly.

Shumer's piece compared this moment to the early days of COVID — not because AI is a virus, but because the speed at which everything is about to rearrange itself will catch most people off guard.

He closes with something every wealth management leader needs to hear: "The single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt."

The people who move early don't just survive. They win.

The custodial arms race is here. It's the best thing that's happened to wealth management in a long time.

But only if you're paying attention.

If this resonated — share it with someone on your team who needs to read it. Most people won't hear this until it's too late.