What Strategic Drift looks like
Strategic drift is a concept from strategy research, associated with Gerry Johnson’s work in the late 1980s. It describes what happens when a firm’s strategy gradually stops fitting the environment around it. It rarely arrives as a crisis. It builds through small, reasonable decisions that each make sense on their own, until the firm looks up and finds that its market has moved.
In WealthTech, drift has a recognizable shape. Product builds for the last customer. Marketing describes the platform. Sales improvises the story. Every team is busy and productive, but the shared anchor, the client and the problem they need solved, slowly falls out of the conversation.
AI is accelerating everything, including drift
Generative AI has moved from experiment to everyday tool remarkably fast. In Advisor360°’s 2025 Connected Wealth Report, 85% of advisors said generative AI helps their business, up from 64% a year earlier, while the share calling it a threat fell from 21% to 8%. 82% now work under a formal AI policy at their firm.
Look at how it is being used, though. The leading uses are predictive analytics, marketing content and meeting notes: valuable time-savers. Only 29% of advisors said they use AI to build personalized client plans.
The same pattern runs through WealthTech roadmaps. AI is most often pitched as efficiency: fewer clicks, faster notes, more output per advisor. Efficiency matters. But efficiency is a feature-level promise, and features are rarely why an advisor, or their client, chooses you.
There is a warning sign in the data, too. The 2025 Kitces AdvisorTech study found advisors using more technology than ever, yet satisfaction fell in 20 of 23 software categories. More tools have not automatically meant better outcomes.
What the client’s client is telling us
Investors are being remarkably clear about where AI belongs.
- Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning & Progress Study (Harris Poll, 4,626 U.S. adults) found that, across planning tasks, roughly half of Americans trust a human advisor more than AI, compared with fewer than one in five who trust AI more. For building a retirement plan, it was 56% to 13%.
- A 2026 Vanguard survey of 6,686 of its investors found that about one in three has used AI for financial help. Yet 63% of Gen Z, millennial and Gen X investors have little or no trust in AI guidance, while 54–63% of every generation highly trust human advisors.
- Investors were about 11 times more likely to say AI increased the value they place on human advice (32%) than decreased it (2.9%). Among AI users, 37% said they had received incorrect or misleading information.
“AI competes with humans on perceived objectivity, but humans have the edge on trust, empathy, and holistic support.”Vanguard
In other words, the end client isn’t asking for less human involvement. They are asking for a better-informed human.
Putting the client back at the center of AI
For WealthTech leaders, this is the opportunity. The firms that win won’t be the ones using AI to do the same things faster. They will be the ones using AI to help advisors understand, serve and connect with clients more deeply. A few questions keep that focus:
- Feature, value or emotion? Our Empathy Matrix asks what a capability does (feature), what it means for the advisor (value), and how it makes the advisor and their client feel (emotion). If your AI story stops at the feature, it is drifting.
- Does it give time back to the relationship? Saved minutes matter when they are reinvested in the client conversation.
- Would the advisor’s client notice? If the end investor would never see the difference, ask whether you are solving the right problem.
- Are Product, Marketing and Sales telling the same AI story? Drift often starts when each team describes AI in its own words.
AI will reshape wealth management. The question is whether it pulls your firm closer to the client or carries it further away. Strategy is how you decide.
Sources
- “Strategic Drift” teaching guide, AQA (Johnson & Scholes model)
- “Advisor360° Survey: Generative AI Use Surges Among Financial Advisors,” Advisor360° (February 2025)
- “Advisors’ Tech Use Is Up, but Satisfaction Is Down: Kitces,” ThinkAdvisor (September 2025)
- “Human Connection Over Machines,” Northwestern Mutual 2025 Planning & Progress Study (August 2025)
- “AI financial advice lifts demand for human advisors, says Vanguard,” InvestmentNews (October 2026)
