Taking the pulse of artificial intelligence adoption in the RIA industry is not easy.
So, I was happy to get an early look at findings from Caddi Technologies, an AI-native workforce provider for wealth, law and other professional services firms (and not to be confused with CADDi, the physical design and manufacturing platform from CADDi Co.).
“The firms getting somewhere with AI all did one thing first: they gave it an owner. Everything else, the data, the controls, the integrations, follows from that decision,” Caddi CEO Alejandro Castellano said.
He and his team came to that conclusion after downloading and analyzing public Securities and Exchange Commission Form ADV data and identifying the 455 largest independent wealth-management RIAs by AUM. They then analyzed Linkedin data for each of the firms’ job postings since late 2023 and examined the LinkedIn profiles of each firm’s current employees.
First of all, for me, the biggest finding was that out of the 455 largest RIAs, only 42 have “someone whose title makes them an AI or innovation leader,” according to Caddi.
Caddi then took those 42 names and analyzed them against hiring data, finding that 71.4% of wealth firms with a clear AI leader have hired for an AI tool. However, among firms without a clear AI leader, only 11% were hiring for AI tools.
For those firms lacking a clear AI leader but with a chief technology or information officer or a head of technology, Caddi still found an effect, but a smaller one; 32.7% with CTOs had hired for people to use or manage AI tools, compared to those without an AI lead or CTO, which hired for AI 8% of the time. Nearly a quarter of firms with a COO (and neither an AI lead nor CTO) had hired for people to use or manage AI tools.
I want to hit two other points (among the many others Caddi makes). First, many of those leading AI are new. Caddi found that 24 of the 42 staff members had AI lead titles, such as chief AI officer, head of AI center of excellence, or head of AI enablement and automation. Seventeen of those 24 had started their roles in 2026, and 12 sit at firms over $25 billion in AUM.
Finally, I wanted to note one of Caddi’s findings about compliance and security, which has been a concern of mine as well over the last several years of covering the surge in AI use in the industry.
Caddi found that 56.6% of those AI-hiring firms have made no compliance-archiving or security hire in addition to their AI hires, based on the data analyzed and discussed above. In other words, their current compliance staff and, in all likelihood, their current compliance technology, remain what they had before using AI.
This seems an untenable position given the rapid advances in AI technology and its adoption across the industry.
Caddi made clear that no firms supplied data, and no firms are named in its report, which will be available in the coming days.
The “Caddy for the Back Office”
I found out about Caddi as a judge for XYPN’s AdviceTech competition held during its 12th annual conference in San Diego in late September.
While it was the AI-native CRM Slant that won both the judged competition and the Advicer’s Choice Award (voted by conference attendees), Caddi made a strong showing. I had the opportunity to speak further with Castellano a couple of weeks after the conference, when he was better able to elaborate on the company’s origin story, which he said had been in development for the last two years.
I knew the company had not initially focused on the RIA market, and I was curious why.
“When we started, we wanted to focus on professional services, we’re the caddy for the back office,” he said.
“We started in law firms and then RIAs—it wasn’t our idea at the beginning [the RIAs] but we then landed some top-10 RIAs—which in turn led us to participating in the XYPN contest,” he said.
In a nutshell, Caddi uses AI to automate repetitive work, with no new tools or changes to a firm’s workflow and no technical skills required.
He said based on his years working for a family office in Peru and its mountains of paperwork there and other jobs he had since then, digitizing and automating workflows within professional services firms could be more productive and create more efficiency gains than most any other industry.
“The moment I realized there were 1.5 million attorneys, a similar number of CPAs and hundreds of thousands to a million financial advisors out there,” said Castellano, noting that he knew there would be plenty of market for his and other competitors. He said that Caddi already works with about a dozen RIA shops with over $1 billion in AUM.
Given the relatively small numbers discussed in this column, many advisors can take a deep breath and relax for a bit if they are not among those who have adopted AI yet. They remain, apparently, in good company.
