USA250: Capitalism (A Special Report) --- Artificial-Intelligence Agents Are Getting Ready to Handle Your Whole Financial Life: AI promises to reshape Wall Street and investors like few other tech changes in its history

“Everyone who manages his or her own finances can relate to the headache.

 

A half dozen apps and logins . . . Investments spread across several retirement and taxable accounts, employer-sponsored 401(k)s and pension funds. . . . It can be an arduous task to get a quick read on how much you have allocated to stocks, bonds and cash, not to mention picking the right mix of assets and periodically rebalancing it.

 

Many people pay advisers to ease that burden of complexity. But in the not-too-distant future, your AI assistant could be doing much of that work for you.

 

Tech and finance executives -- well aware of how Wall Street is constantly reinventing itself with technology -- are investing billions in new AI tools. And most agree: It's a matter of when, not if, agentic AI can act on a person's behalf across numerous accounts.

 

"You're going to have a personal AI assistant offering advice, no doubt," says Nitin Tandon, chief information officer at Vanguard Group, the investment manager with more than 50 million U.S. customers.

 

And that is just the beginning. "It is likely that agentic AI's capabilities will soon reach a tipping point that will impact banking and financial services in profound ways," University of Cambridge researchers Bryan Zhang and Kieran Garvey wrote in June.

 

Agentic tools, for instance, will soon perform tasks such as examining the balances of one's bank accounts and credit-card debt, before suggesting and then executing an optimal payment strategy depending on a user's consent thresholds, the researchers wrote.

 

Concern over AI-run-wild means that many of the tools in development are being held back from widespread public availability. For now, Vanguard has rolled out voice-enabled AI chatbots that handle customer-service calls after hours, with impressive satisfaction rates. It has also launched a generative-AI tool for financial advisers, which pulls from Vanguard's content library to rewrite articles catered directly to specific clients at their level of financial understanding.

 

Meanwhile, AI tools that examine a customer's full portfolio and provide advice are under development, and they could prove to be a breakthrough for millions of middle-class Americans who can't afford or aren't desired by financial advisers.

 

"If you want to scale financial advice to 50 million clients, you're not going to find enough advisers to do that," Tandon says. "AI is going to allow you to scale financial advice to a far larger population that may be looking for it."

 

Few are predicting that AI will replace financial advisers. Human relationships and trust are hard to replicate. But there's no doubt the technology will disrupt the industry. Advisers are rapidly gaining the ability to outsource note-taking, portfolio analysis and other time-sucking tasks, freeing up time for more meetings and more clients, Tandon says.

 

Younger generations that are comfortable with tech may find the extensive financial planning and analysis available from free AI tools to be satisfactory, putting pressure on advisers' fees.

 

On Wall Street, investing pros are already turning to AI for help.

 

This summer, portfolio managers walking into BlackRock's Midtown Manhattan headquarters might have started their day with a few questions for Asimov.

 

That's not the name of a colleague -- it's their new AI analyst assistant. "They love it," says BlackRock chief operating officer Rob Goldstein.

 

Asimov handles many of the responsibilities that Wall Street investment analysts are traditionally tasked with. It analyzes reports and regulatory filings, scans copious amounts of data for anomalies, and tracks social media and real-time news that could have an impact on the companies that it is studying.

 

What might take a human hours can be computed instantly by Asimov, which is capable of plugging insights directly into financial models rather than waiting for a human to review it.

 

"Asimov is effectively giving our humans superpowers," Goldstein says. "It means they aren't forced to ration resources. They can be on every earnings call. They can be everywhere and see everything."

 

Meanwhile, brokerage company eToro launched a suite of new AI tools for customers on Aug. 7 that might offer a glimpse at the future for everyday investors.

 

While only available to a subset of sophisticated customers for now, eToro's AI tools allow individual investors to code a specific trading strategy with AI, and then have AI execute that strategy on their behalf -- similar to the quantitative strategies used by hedge funds.

 

It's one of the first examples of an AI agent that can actually trade on a retail customer's behalf. eToro also just launched an AI assistant, Tori, within its app, which is capable of assisting and advising on a number of investment tasks.

 

Tori lives within the eToro app for now, but chief executive Yoni Assia says AI agents will soon work across different apps.

 

"In the relatively near future, AI will know about all of your assets and liabilities," Assia says. "It will be able to provide advice or execute transactions for you, across all of your connected accounts."

 

Still, all these financial companies will need to balance liability risks with the risk of getting left behind on technology. After all, the consequences of an AI agent completing a transaction incorrectly -- or giving overly risky financial advice -- are significant.

 

That's why big, brand-conscious institutions like Vanguard are taking a careful approach, rolling out systems with significant guardrails. Lesser-known startups might not be as careful.

 

"This level of autonomy introduces risks," wrote Zhang and Garvey, the Cambridge researchers. "Financial institutions and regulators will need to ensure that safeguards are in place."

 

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Jack Pitcher is a Wall Street Journal markets reporter. Email him at jack.pitcher@wsj.com.” [1]

 

1. USA250: Capitalism (A Special Report) --- Artificial-Intelligence Agents Are Getting Ready to Handle Your Whole Financial Life: AI promises to reshape Wall Street and investors like few other tech changes in its history. Pitcher, Jack.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Sep 2025: R22.