Financial Planning column: why advisors often abandon AI note-takers after a month

The Financial Planning column describes an AI rollout its author calls increasingly common at RIAs. The vendor demo scans a client review, drafts the notes, flags action items and pushes a summary into the CRM. Compliance clears it. Everyone agrees the tool will save advisors three or four hours a week.

Adoption unwinds on a rough schedule: most team members use it in week one and about half by week two. By the one-month mark, advisors — especially the senior ones — are back to typing their own notes, the column says.

Nobody complained about the technology, and no one made a conscious decision to stop using it, according to the column. Ask why and the explanations are "I just haven't gotten around to it" and "I like my own notes better."

The author, who writes of decades coaching senior operators, argues the problem is the brain, not the software. The demo was approved by the prefrontal cortex — the reasoning, planning part. An older survival system the author calls "the caveman" asks one question: is it safe or is it new?

Hand-typed notes are safe. They have never embarrassed an experienced advisor in front of a client and never produced a summary that missed the one detail a compliance officer would ask about, the column says. An AI summary might. The response to that threat is a freeze rather than a decision: the old habit feels a little easier, the new tool a little more inconvenient, and "I'll start using it next week" sounds reasonable again the week after.

Until firms treat the drop-off as a human brain problem, the author writes, a lot of AI budget will pay for software that sits unused.

That diagnosis implies the constraint on meeting-assistant software is habit rather than capability, and that a rollout measured by licenses bought rather than week-two usage will land in the same place. For an advisor sitting through the next vendor demo, the practical claim is that adoption is a habit-building problem, not a selection problem.