Back Office Jobs At Risk; Advisors Safe (For Now): T3 Tech Conference

Charles Paikert

11 March 2026

While financial advisors may be safe in an RIA landscape rapidly being transformed by artificial intelligence, the jury is out on back-office workers and other positions, according to industry experts at the opening day of the T3 Technology Conference in New Orleans.

“The structure of an advisory firm will be significantly different than it’s been in the last 20 to 30 years,” T3 founder Joel Bruckenstein said in his opening remarks . “The skill sets you need in your firm are going to change.”

The ideal practice has three support staff for every advisor, but soon two will be AI agents and one will be human, Bruckenstein said in interview with Family Wealth Report. “Reconciliation is going away,” he said. “That’s a job for an agent. Portfolio management may be at risk because you can now have a CFA in a box. And the function of an entry level security analyst can be replaced.”

Human advisors should keep their jobs, Bruckenstein said. “You’re not going to get empathy from a robot anytime soon.”

“Lines will get blurred”
“Everybody’s job is changing,” Nitrogen co-founder Aaron Klein said in his keynote address. “Think of an advisor as an orchestrator handling multiple streams of work from an AI co-worker.”

Klein, who now heads software firm Contio, said in an interview that he wasn’t sure if back office jobs would be lost as a result of AI, but “lines will get blurred. Back office staff will start talking to clients. But if you want to continue doing your job as before in a linear way, that job won’t be there.”

Artificial intelligence will be an accelerant for the industry, but some jobs will be replaced by AI agents, said TradePMR CEO Robb Baldwin. “If I have to hire 100 people to scale, that’s not efficient.”

The new technology won’t replace advisors by doing their work, but rather will present advisors with options, said Dan Daum, CEO of AI platform Wealthstream. “There’s a lot of anxiety about AI,” Daum said. “But AI won’t be doing the thinking for an advisor, it will improve the advisor’s thinking.”

Products like Wealthstream will also help advisory firms train young advisors, Daum claimed, and save the firm time by reducing hours senior level advisors have to spend on training, developing and mentoring junior staff.

“Agentic AI means better execution”
Advisory firms can also expect to have more clients per advisor as a result of AI, said Era Jain, CEO of agentic software firm Zepyln in an interview. “Agentic AI means better execution,” Jain said. “Agents will be leveraged to do more operations work and deliver advice at scale, allowing firms to grow more rapidly add capacity and expand the client base.”

The conference’s opening day also saw a steady drumbeat of sales pitches and several product announcements.

TradePMR’s Baldwin, whose custodial platform was bought by Robinhood in 2024, pitched his company’s new digital referral program, Nitrogen CEO Dan Zitting touted his firm’s agentic proposal generator and Orion’s Paul Wick, SVP for business development, presented his company's latest line of AI products.

AdvisorEngine Portfolio Solutions announced a new Turnkey Asset Management Program , and Morningstar introduced an AI Assistant for Advisor Workflow,

Wealthstream launched a platform for NextGen advisors and Kwanti, a portfolio analytics vendor, unveiled a new cash flow feature.

While the nonstop onslaught of product presentations seemed to have worn some attendees down, they did serve to underscore Klein’s observation that AI has brought the industry “an era of abundance.”