Wealth Firms Warn AI Vendors About Mission Creep

WealthManagement.com reported from the BNY INSITE conference in Aurora, Colo., that wealth-technology leaders cautioned about a rise in AI vendor mission creep. On a panel, Sanctuary Wealth CTO Bob Coppola said the firm had gone as far as to force integration with its customer relationship management system to avoid problems, and warned that a lot of the AI-based vendors are straying from what he would consider their core competency because they can, which can lead to anarchy. Zocks Chief Strategy Officer Steven Latow told attendees that registered investment advisors are under pressure to AI everything.

Panelists placed the difficulty on data quality and coherence rather than on any single model or feature. Coppola said many teams treat AI as an easy button that will manage the data for them, and noted that inconsistent naming across systems, for example calling the same security different things in three places, will confuse AI systems. That frames the near-term work as data integration, canonical identifiers, and consistent metadata management.

As vendors rapidly add features that reach into adjacent parts of the stack, firms with fragmented data estates face more operational complexity during deployments. For wealth managers adopting generative and agentic AI, the reported consequence is heavier integration and governance burden, which feeds directly into vendor-selection and risk assessment.

• •Vendor scope expansion beyond core APIs or analytics.
• •Adoption of forced or vendor-led CRM integrations.
• •Vendor claims that AI will manage firm data, which shift data-governance risk onto buyers.