VIEW FROM THE CROWD | FUTURE PROOF FESTIVAL
From the Ocean Stage audience, Anthropic, Schwab and Dynasty made the case that AI’s first real breakthrough for RIAs is not replacing advisors. It is giving them back the time to advise.
Huntington Beach, California | September 14, 2026
From my seat in the crowd at Future Proof’s Ocean Stage, the most important idea in a panel about artificial intelligence was not that advisors need one more powerful application. It was that they should no longer have to act as the integration layer between all the applications they already use.
Michael Batnick of Ritholtz Wealth Management moderated The End of the Swivel: Rethinking the Advisor’s Day with AI, joined by Peter Nolan of Anthropic, Shirl Penney of Dynasty Financial Partners and Jon Beatty of Schwab Advisor Services. The timing gave the conversation particular weight. Anthropic had just launched Claude for Financial Advisors, while Dynasty announced a next-generation AI operating layer for wealth built on Claude.
An intelligence layer, not another app
Nolan described Claude as an orchestrator across the advisor technology stack. The ambition is not to sweep away the CRM, financial planning system, portfolio tools or custodial platform. It is to sit above them, move information between them and remove the manual data entry and extraction that keep people swiveling from screen to screen.
That distinction matters. Wealth management has spent years assembling capable point solutions, yet many firms still rely on human beings to bridge the gaps between them. Penney put the problem bluntly: what should die is “all the wasted time” spent on low-value work. The stack is not necessarily broken. The way people are forced to navigate it is.
| “The advice comes from the advisor. The technology does the work.” SHIRL PENNEY, DYNASTY FINANCIAL PARTNERS |
The virtual chief of staff test
The clearest practical example came from Penney. Imagine an advisor beginning the day with a simple question: Who should I call today? Answering it well may require the financial plan, CRM notes, life events, portfolio data and upcoming obligations. An AI layer can assemble that context, identify a priority and suggest a next action. The advisor still decides whether the recommendation is right and what advice to give.
This is a better test of advisor AI than a flashy chatbot demonstration. Can the technology help a firm notice the client who needs attention, prepare the advisor with the right context and remove the administrative work around the conversation? If it can, it improves service without pretending that empathy, judgment and accountability can be automated away.
The panel did not fully accept the familiar forecast that every advisor will suddenly double the number of households served. Batnick challenged that assumption, pointing out that meaningful client conversations are demanding work. Penney’s more convincing standard was quality: use the time returned by technology so every client can feel like the firm’s best client.
Access may widen, but readiness will still divide firms
Nolan emphasized that the product is intended for smaller RIAs as well as enterprise firms. He said advisors will be able to use it through a standard Claude agreement, connect subscriptions they already pay for and choose whether Claude becomes a primary interface or works through existing tools. Beatty said Schwab plans to make the capability available to its 16,000 RIAs before year-end, with more detail expected at IMPACT.
That could democratize sophisticated workflows, but access is not the same as readiness. Penney repeatedly returned to clean, reconciled data and the operational discipline required to use it. An intelligence layer can coordinate good systems and expose poor ones. It cannot make messy data, unclear processes or weak accountability disappear. In fact, it may reveal them faster.
This is where the competitive gap may open. Firms that know their workflows, assign owners and maintain reliable client data can compound each improvement. Firms that treat AI as a shortcut may automate inconsistency. The winners will not simply be the fastest buyers. They will be the firms that redesign the work around the client.
Trust starts with limits
The questions from the crowd quickly moved to privacy, security and conflicting records. That was encouraging. In advice, orchestration is useful only if the guardrails are credible. Nolan said Anthropic does not train its models on enterprise customer data. Beatty said Schwab’s initial implementation will be read-only, with encrypted data and an agreement that custodial data will not be used to train the model.
The most important safeguard may be the least technical. When two connected systems disagree, Nolan said Claude should surface the conflict and ask the advisor to decide what is true. Write-back is part of the longer-term vision, not the starting point. That sequence is sensible: visibility first, authority second and automation only when the firm is ready to own the result.
Empowerment needs to show up in careers
The panel also resisted the easy story that efficiency must mean fewer people. Penney said firms are more likely to redeploy talented employees into higher-value work. Nolan pointed to client service associates as likely power users because they understand the manual tasks most deeply and are often best placed to build and refine new workflows. “You don’t let go of the CSA that did that,” he said. “You promote them.”
That is an appealing vision, but it should become a management commitment rather than a conference slogan. If AI raises revenue per employee, firms have choices. They can improve service, broaden access, invest in growth, develop their people or simply expand margins. The technology will not make that decision. Leadership will.
The advisor should stop being the swivel chair
The phrase “end of the swivel” captures something more practical than the grand claims usually attached to AI. It describes the end of a person copying, pasting, searching and reconciling simply because the systems around them cannot coordinate. It means technology carries context to the advisor, rather than the advisor spending the day carrying context between technologies.
From the crowd, this felt less like a vision of machines replacing advice and more like an overdue redesign of the advisor’s day. The hard work now begins: integrations must perform, data promises must hold, firms must govern the new workflows and the time saved must actually reach clients.
If that happens, the end of the swivel will not be the end of the technology stack. It will be the beginning of a better relationship between the stack, the advisor and the people the advisor serves.
Editorial source note
Prepared from Alex Sullivan’s audience notes and the full Granola transcript of the September 14, 2026 Ocean Stage session. Proper names and obvious transcription errors have been corrected. Product, rollout and security statements are attributed to the panelists and should be rechecked if publication is delayed.
Public references: Future Proof Festival agenda | Dynasty’s Claude announcement
