Client relationship management  remains the most valuable software category for financial advisors, followed by financial planning, portfolio management, trading/rebalancing, investment analytics and data document management and risk tolerance.

The findings were part of the annual software survey conducted by Technology Tools for Today founder Joel Bruckenstein and Inside Information publisher Bob Veres, unveiled at the close of the first day of the T3 Technology Conference in New Orleans. 

New categories for the survey included AI notetaker, following the recent introduction of generative language AI, search AI, and graphics AI categories.

Artificial intelligence is the center of attention at the conference, but just 52 per cent of the nearly 3,000 advisors who responded to the survey respondents reported using one or more search or generative AI tools, although that number is up from 41 per cent last year.

ChatGPT holds the largest market share , followed by Microsoft Copilot , Google Gemini , Perplexity , and Anthropic .

Notetakers proliferate
“Perhaps the most exciting part of the survey is the category we added: AI Notetaking Solutions,” said Veres. “We were able to identify 14 of them this year, up from exactly one last year, and their aggregate market share in one year reached 43 per cent. It’s probably over 60 per cent now, given the rocket-like trajectory.” 

“Altruist’s Hazel AI solution had not been announced when we launched the survey, so of course it wasn’t included,” Veres said. “But it attracted enough write-in votes that it would have finished third in market share in the survey.” For planning, Social Security analysis tools are being used by more than half of responding advisors, followed by estate planning, tax planning and college planning.

Disappointments
“Less optimistically, only 18 per cent of advisors are using one of the retirement distribution planning tools and seem to rely more on Monte Carlo analysis, which is far less sophisticated than what Income Lab or Retirement Analyzer are offering,” Veres said.

Only 3 per cent of responding firms said they are implementing a data warehouse approach to their tech stack, a situation that Veres calls “the bleeding edge of the fintech world.”

And just 22 per cent of firms are using one of the 12 listed cybersecurity firms. “That’s disappointing,” Veres said, “and it has been consistent through the life of our survey.” 

Noting the wide variety of software options available to advisors, Veres said he suspects that “few are familiar with the full extent of the expansion of their fintech ecosystem, or the tools that they could be adding to meet the needs of staff and clients.”