AI: Who Benefits Most?

Originally published in FORUM Magazine (Advocis), May 2026 issue.

If you've been scrolling LinkedIn lately, you can be forgiven for assuming artificial intelligence (AI) is primarily a productivity feature. Minutes saved per meeting. Some new dashboard the dealer or managing general agency wants you to log in to. Something the next generation of advisors will use to outpace the senior generation.

That is not entirely accurate.

My company, Continuum, is the AI system used by some of Canada's best independent advisors. We've worked with some 100 firms these past 18 months, and the pattern that has emerged is almost the inverse of what shows up in your feed.

The advisors getting the most out of AI are not the ones you would expect. They're not their firms' early adopters or tech people. Instead, they are the senior advisors with deep books, the ones who have always been a bit stubborn about software, who scribble notes by hand and keep half of every client relationship in their own heads. Put a useful AI tool in their hands and they do not save 12 minutes per meeting. They start doing things they have never had the time to do at scale.

Why AI matters

This shift in how senior advisors work is arriving at the most consequential moment of their careers. More than a trillion dollars will move between generations of Canadians over the coming decade. Roughly four out of five inheritors leave their parents' advisor within a year of receiving the inheritance. Nearly half of Canadian advisors are over 50. The practice you spent decades building is, statistically, not the practice your top clients' children intend to use.

This is usually framed as a marketing or relationship problem. But it's neither. It is an operational problem that has shadowed Canadian independent advice for years.

The next generation of clients wants more than a better-curated investment portfolio. They want holistic advice that addresses their entire financial picture: context across multiple accounts, a side business, equity compensation, real estate and estate planning. They want their advisor to know what they said six months ago and follow up before they ask. They were raised on apps that integrate everything they own. They notice when their advisor cannot.

Scaling relationship-building

To deliver that level of service to 150 households, a senior advisor would need to track far more information about each client, follow up more often and engage with parts of clients' financial lives that have historically sat outside the engagement letter. Doing this work manually is not feasible.

The industry's instinct has been to specialize: narrow the book, raise minimums and accept that the next generation will go elsewhere. But that is less a long-term strategy than a slow exit. It is also pulling advisors away from the average Canadian. Each time minimums get raised, another household is priced out of real advice and pushed toward a bank channel or robo-advisor. The clients who would benefit most from holistic advice become the least able to access it.

Another alternative used to be to industrialize the practice: build standardized processes, hire associates and push more of the work to operations. That is how large firms have long operated, and why many feel much like utilities to the people they serve. You can deliver consistency that way. You cannot deliver intimacy. The next generation can tell.

But now for the first time, there's a third option. AI addresses types of advice that have historically been difficult to scale, such as good judgment and attention to detail. It works best in practices where those qualities are already central. Senior advisors with deep books have, almost by accident, built exactly the kind of practice AI compounds. The advisor who scaled by process has not.

The pattern is consistent across the firms we work with. The advisors who change most are not the ones running pilots on new technology. They are running their practices differently within weeks of starting.

One senior advisor in Ontario trialled Continuum for two weeks last year and called to say it had fundamentally changed how he ran his practice. A month later, he rolled it out to his entire branch. The shift was about what he could suddenly do seamlessly: capture every client meeting without taking notes, draft a compliance-ready proposal in seconds or even answer a question such as "What did the Singhs say last December about the cottage?" in another meeting months later. The practice he built over decades finally had the operational capacity it had always lacked.

A new chapter

Today's reality? Advisors who built quiet, judgment-heavy practices have long been seen as the smaller, more vulnerable end of the industry. But that was not accurate. In many ways, they were the model others were trying to emulate — just without the scale. Now, they are positioned to pull ahead in ways larger, structure-driven firms struggle to match.

The coming wealth transfer will not be won by the advisors with the biggest books. It will be won by the practices that can serve the next generation at the same level their parents' generation received. AI makes that possible.

Canadian senior advisors with deep books and a stubborn bias toward intimacy over process are in a stronger position today than they have been in years. The decade ahead does not mark the end of this kind of practice. It marks the beginning of its most interesting chapter — but only for advisors who realize that the technology has finally caught up with the way they have always wanted to work.