Rumors of CRMs’ demise may have been greatly exaggerated.
AUG 21, 2026
By Ben Henry-Moreland and Michael Kitces
The CRM has been a core part of the advisory firm tech stack for many decades: first as a digital Rolodex of client contact information, then as a repository of client meeting notes and supplemental information, and eventually as a hub for workflows and task management built off of the data stored within the CRM system. CRMs thus became the “system of record” for RIAs that contained the definitive data for each client, and many other technology tools build their integration capabilities primarily around CRMs like Wealthbox, Redtail, and Salesforce because they need client data to run off of, and the CRM is where that data lives.
But despite the importance of CRMs to advisory firms, they aren’t the best-loved piece of software. CRMs are as close to a universally adopted tool as exists in the advisor technology market, with the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Technology showing 92.5% of advisors using some type of dedicated CRM. But advisors’ satisfaction with their CRMs was below average relative to the software’s importance, rating only as a 7.5 out of 10 on average (compared to an average satisfaction of 8.0 for financial planning software, the only major tool to exceed CRM’s adoption rate in the survey). Which suggests that the CRM market is ripe for some disruption, with the incumbent providers’ (dominated by the top 3 of Wealthbox, Redtail, and Salesforce) failure to fully live up to the expectations of the advisors relying on them making them vulnerable to a newcomer who could do a better job.
What is it, exactly, that the incumbent CRMs are failing to do for advisors? It isn’t the function of being a repository for client data; instead, it’s making it easier for the advisor to do something with that data. If there’s no easy way to search through data (which might stretch back years or even decades for some clients) or identify specific actions that need to be taken or issues to be addressed, then the CRM doesn’t serve much more of a role than as an archiving tool for compliance purposes.
And so when AI meeting notetakers started to come onto the scene beginning in 2023, and quickly expanded their capabilities beyond ‘just’ transcribing meeting notes and drafting follow-up emails to assigning tasks, pulling out key information from email and CRM notes for future action items, and sending out information to financial planning and other tools, it inevitably raised speculation that CRMs were in danger of being ‘eaten’ by the new generation of AI tools. In other words, with notetakers building out the functionalities that allow advisors to make more and better use of their data, CRMs risked having their roles being whittled back down to their original function as a digital Rolodex, with AI notetakers taking over the job of doing all the high-value tasks built on top of that data.
But despite many proclamations about the demise of the CRM, there are two reasons that they could prove unfounded. One is that, as history has shown, it’s difficult to get advisors to buy an additional standalone software tool to improve the way their existing tools work. We’ve seen this in areas like digital onboarding (which has failed to take off as a standalone category because, despite the inefficiency of opening new client accounts at many custodians, most advisors don’t want to buy a separate tool to make it better) and workflows (where tools like Hubly, despite offering clear improvements over the workflow capabilities of the CRMs they overlay, have gained only limited adoption because they cost as much or more as the CRM software itself). Advisors quickly adopted standalone AI notetakers early on simply because there were no alternatives at the time, but now that seemingly every tool has an AI notetaker built into it we can expect the adoption of standalone providers to begin to plateau going forward.
The second reason is that, after so many decades as a core component of the tech stack, it’s hard to detach advisors from the notion of the CRM as the system of record and hub of daily client-related activity. It might make sense conceptually to move to a system where data synchronizes automatically from one system to another, using an “orchestration” solution like Dispatch or MileMarker Navigator, with the notetaker as the advisor interface, which would eliminate the need to even have a CRM to serve as the data repository. But it’s another thing to convince advisors to abandon a system that they’ve used for 40+ years, even despite its flaws.
Against this backdrop, Slant emerged about one year ago as a new ‘AI-native’ CRM, which serves as a traditional CRM in the sense that it houses all of the client information in one repository, but also builds in numerous AI features built on that data (from notetaking to a chatbot interface for querying client data to researching and answering client questions) as well as deep workflow functionality. All of which has made Slant a popular choice for newer advisory firms entering the industry, while convincing others to switch from incumbents like Wealthbox and Redtail.
And now, amidst the early successes of Slant, a new wave of other AI-native CRMs have begun to pop up seeking to combine the traditional CRM role with modern AI functionality, including FinTurk, OmegaFP, and Cadix, all of which have two primary aims: (1) To improve upon the experience of traditional CRM functions (e.g., to feature deeper workflow capabilities and AI-enhanced search functions), and (2) to build in AI capabilities that enhance how advisors use the CRM’s data, from automated emails to agentic workflows to automatically flagging important issues for the advisor to deal with.
So it’s possible to see now why early debates around whether or not AI notetakers would disintermediate traditional CRMs might have missed the point. As the popularity of Slant shows, advisors are happy to keep using CRMs as they always have if those CRMs help the advisor make better use of the data that they hold. And given the reluctance of many advisors to buy multiple separate tools to manage the same function, the emergence of several new CRMs that combine both traditional CRM and AI notetaking functions might be bad news for both the incumbent CRMs (which have been relatively slow to add their own AI features) and standalone AI notetakers (which would be redundant for advisors who have all the same functions built into their CRM).
In other words, it may have been premature to declare the rise of AI notetakers as the demise of traditional CRMs. Because ultimately, it isn’t the concept of CRMs that is broken – advisors still would rather have a centralized store of information, and productivity functions like workflows and communications tools built on top of that data (that preferably don’t require buying another piece of software to do well). Instead, advisors’ dissatisfaction was with the actual CRM tools they had to work with – which, now that a new crop of AI-native CRMs is starting to emerge, could still eventually find themselves disrupted, even if it’s from within the CRM category itself rather than from the AI notetakers as everyone expected.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-august2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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