Tech Explained: Here’s a simplified explanation of the latest technology update around Tech Explained: Orion Sets AI Goals for All Staff in Simple Termsand what it means for users..
All of wealthtech provider Orion’s more than 1,300 employees have an “AI goal” to meet in 2026 as the firm seeks to use artificial intelligence to its best advantage and deliver it to its universe of more than 30,000 advisor clients.
“Everyone at Orion has set an AI goal for themselves in 2026 so that they can elevate the work that they do and the impact that they have, and we can do that to the collective advantage of our clients,” Orion CEO Natalie Wolfsen said on the sidelines of the firm’s annual Orion Ascent conference in San Diego.
Wolfsen said the firm has hired AI experts and brought in AI training and consulting to identify opportunities and work with employees. She gave the example of a customer service representative having a goal to “deliver intelligence to the AI chatbot.” A marketing employee may have a goal to use AI for lead generation and brand management.
Wolfsen has her AI goals, too.
“My goal is to ensure that everyone at Orion is learning about AI as quickly as AI is advancing, and that our AI initiatives are either geared toward elevating existing client features that are highly time-consuming for financial advisors,” she said. “What I want to do is I want to deliver minutes and hours back into financial advisors’ days.”
A survey Orion released Wednesday at the conference, however, shows the steep hill advisors must climb to leverage AI.
The will is at least partly there, with over half (55%) of 571 financial advisors saying that AI and automation will have the greatest impact on future firm success. Meanwhile, just 6% say they utilize agentic workflows—or those that surface relevant information unprompted—and only 5% have implemented AI across different systems.
Last year, Orion announced a beta test of its self-built Denali AI, set to launch this year, promising to connect systems and workflows across Orion’s ecosystem. The Orion Ascent conference features Denali AI demos for attendees.
The country’s second-largest wealthtech firm by assets under administration is seeking to expand AI use for its advisor clients beyond specific tasks such as note-taking. Wolfsen’s vision is to have AI tools draw client data from various disparate portals—the CRM, financial planning tool and portfolio construction software—to surface into the long-sought-after single pane for advisors.
“If it can be one industry workflow where you can say, ‘what’s happening with Natalie Wolfsen’s portfolio right now?’” she said. “In an ideal world, that would all be a verbal conversation we’re having where AI is showing the results to the client and the advisor in real time, and then when the client says, ‘Yes, I’d like to do that,’ you can open the account and execute on the strategy.”
According to Orion’s survey, obstacles to expanded AI use by financial advisors include concerns about “accuracy and client trust (49%); uncertainty about compliance/regulation (42%); and limited internal expertise or training (37%).”
In the meantime, Orion faces competition from Envestnet, which is also investing in AI, as well as figuring out how to work with or ignore the proliferation of AI tools and technology in the wealth management sector.
Wolfsen said she is comfortable with the firm’s capital position to stay on its current trajectory. Private equity firm TA Associates took a majority stake in Orion back in 2015, then brought in investor Genstar Capital.
On Tuesday, both LPL and Orion announced expanded relationships with Anthropic, the creator of the Claude large language model (and which also recently launched a set of Claude agents specific to financial services and wealth management).
Reed Colley, president of Orion Advisor Technology, said on the sidelines of the conference that the firm had leveraged Anthropic in some of its own internal AI work and sees it as a good partner for the “back end” of its AI tools, though it is not an exclusive partnership.
“What we saw was the highest signal out of Anthropic, the least amount of hallucinations, and the best efficiency,” he said. “We made that decision [to work with them] last fall, and they’ve done a good job of continuing to update and make better models available.”
Orion has also been investing in its AI efforts through an innovation lab it opened last year. Wolfsen said in a short time that the AI push has gone beyond the one “lab” to be embedded across the firm’s offices in Omaha and its satellite offices in Berwyn, Pa.; San Francisco; Lehi, Utah, and others.
In her opening remarks at the conference, she compared today to the 1960s in terms of technological advancements and the anxiety they sparked. She highlighted changes to music and art, as well as advancements in computing.
“The advantage went to those folks who said ‘What can we do with this [technology],’ not to the folks who were worried about what it would do to them,” she said.