How Leading Firms in Asset and Wealth Management Are Getting AI Right

MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025  report delivers a striking conclusion: despite billions of dollars invested, 95% of AI initiatives fail to deliver measurable business value. Adoption is widespread, but transformation is rare. The report calls this the “GenAI Divide”—a stark separation between the few organizations realizing impact and the many stuck in pilots and experiments.

This divide is visible in asset and wealth management too. Some firms rush into AI with ambition but stall before impact. Yet our clients—leaders across both asset and wealth management—are proving that success is possible. Their projects are not experiments; they are reshaping sales and marketing strategies and creating measurable competitive advantage.

What makes the difference? In our experience, three factors separate the 5% who succeed from the 95% who do not.

1. Domain Expertise Guides AI

The MIT report is clear: failure is rarely about model quality. It is about whether tools fit real workflows and adapt to context. In asset and wealth management, this context is everything.

In asset management, the task for AI is navigating the scale and complexity of distribution—managing networks of intermediaries, positioning products across diverse markets, and ensuring the right firms and advisors are reached at the right moment. By contrast, in wealth management the challenge is almost the opposite: intimacy. Here, AI must help strengthen trust at the client and household level, augmenting rather than replacing advisor judgment, and operating within the strict boundaries of compliance and regulation.

Our clients succeed because their AI initiatives are built on this domain knowledge. Domain expertise ensures that AI is not generic or misaligned, but targeted and relevant. It turns technology from a novelty into a multiplier of real business outcomes.

2. Careful Use Case Selection

The MIT study highlights why most pilots stall: too many initiatives lack focus, chase visibility over value, or fail to integrate into workflows. Investment is heavily skewed toward sales and marketing—up to 70% of AI budgets, according to survey data. Yet many of those dollars are wasted on high-profile experiments that never scale.

The firms that succeed choose differently. They begin with carefully selected use cases—projects that solve meaningful challenges, prove value early, and build confidence to expand.

We’ve seen this dynamic repeatedly in our client work. Whether it is sharpening sales productivity, enhancing marketing effectiveness, or refining distribution strategies, success starts by choosing the right battle. The lesson is simple but powerful: winning with AI is as much about what you don’t do as what you do.

3. Strong Engagement Management

One of the report’s most important insights is that external partnerships succeed twice as often as internal builds. Why? Because successful projects are not only about the technology—they are about leadership, governance, and execution.

AI initiatives require orchestrating stakeholders across sales, marketing, compliance, IT, and leadership. In asset management, this often means aligning global distribution and product leaders with marketing teams. In wealth management, it means ensuring that advisors trust the insights AI delivers and see them as tools to strengthen—not weaken—their client relationships.

Our clients succeed because they treat project management as strategic. They invest in guiding these relationships, maintaining clear communication, and ensuring adoption at every level. This discipline turns AI from an exciting idea into a sustained source of advantage.

Bridging the Divide

MIT’s research shows how easily AI efforts falter. The GenAI Divide is real: tools that don’t learn, pilots that never scale, budgets skewed to the wrong priorities. But it also shows that a growing group of organizations are crossing the divide by focusing on expertise, precision, and disciplined execution.

That is exactly what we see with our clients. Across asset and wealth management, the firms we partner with are succeeding with AI in sales and marketing. Their projects are not hype-driven pilots. They are measurable initiatives reshaping how firms sell, market, and grow.

The gap between 95% failure and 5% success is not a matter of luck—it is a matter of leadership. And in asset and wealth management, that leadership is proving how powerful AI can be when it is designed to fit the business, not the other way around.