How Advisory Firms Measure AI ROI: Adoption, Efficiency, and Effectiveness
Financial firms want to know whether AI delivers a return and how to measure it. When I was consulting for large financial institutions at EY, vendors promised a 10 to 15% ROI if every advisor used their product. Often, nobody used it, and the firm saw no return on its investment at all.
Recently, Marc Butler, an Osaic-affiliated advisor at Anthony Petsis & Associates, shared with me how his eight-person firm evaluates AI tools and measures what they deliver. The firm has set back-to-back records for net new assets without adding staff. It got there by choosing tools the team would actually use, turning saved hours into client time, and tracking what that time produced.
At Jump, we call those the three pillars of AI ROI: adoption, efficiency, and effectiveness.
1. Adoption: Return starts with use
Adoption is how widely and deeply your advisors use a tool, and every other return depends on it.
According to a study published by the University of Chicago, at the end of 2023, roughly 12% of financial advisors had used AI for work, the lowest rate among 11 professions studied. By May 2026, 82% were using AI in their practice, according to Edward Jones. The shift came from tools that solve a long-standing problem – the manual admin around every client meeting – without asking advisors to change how they work. For a small firm without dedicated technology staff, ease of adoption decides whether a tool gets used at all. For Marc, Jump set a new standard for ease of use in advisor tech.
"Literally within 5 to 7 minutes, I was using Jump," says Marc. "And that afternoon, I was actually recording meetings with clients."
Tip: When you evaluate a tool, measure how long it takes an advisor to go from sign-up to a live client meeting, and weigh that alongside the other financial advisor software features on your list.
2. Efficiency: Removing manual work from the day
Efficiency measures whether a tool your advisors use removes manual work and moves time from administrative tasks to client-facing ones.
When advisors rank what they want from AI, more capacity to engage and advise clients comes first, according to Accenture research. Kitces research found that before AI, advisors spent more than 10 hours a week on post-meeting service, admin, and compliance. At Butler's firm, that time went to handwritten meeting notes that someone later retyped into the CRM.
Now Jump records the meeting, formats notes with the firm's own templates, pushes tasks into Redtail CRM, and connects with eMoney for financial planning data. The team estimates it saves 20 to 25 hours a week across the office. "We can spend a lot more time really focusing on the client, instead of worrying about, hey, did we catch that last piece of information," Butler says.
Tip: Pick one operational metric you already track – such as outstanding client-service tasks – and compare it for users and non-users 90 days after rollout.
3. Effectiveness: Turning reclaimed time into growth
Effectiveness asks whether reclaimed time shows up in the KPIs that matter most: net new assets, conversion, and client service.
More capacity for prospecting conversations is only part of the return. AI should also help you convert more of the conversations you already have.
I like to group effectiveness metrics into three areas:
- Knowing clients: The number of client needs your advisors identify in meetings, and how client sentiment trends across your book
- Converting clients: The net new assets your advisors capture, and the share of proposals that turn into new business
- Servicing clients: The number of open client-service tasks per advisor, and the share of meeting notes that sync to your CRM
At a top three independent broker-dealer with about 4,000 advisors, advisors using Jump saw 2.1x more net new asset growth than a matched group with the same prior-year growth. Butler's firm, in business for 47 years, set a record for net new assets last year and is on pace to double it this year without adding staff.
"If we have had two record years in a row and we're not adding more people, that's really creating great scale," says Butler. Jump also analyzes conversational data to surface opportunities across the whole book. His team found that clients holding large cash balances at the bank were a bigger opportunity than they had realized.
Tip: Choose one metric from each area, record a baseline before rollout, and track it alongside the financial advisor KPIs you already report on.
Turn the time AI saves into measurable growth
Butler's team reviews Jump's insights in its weekly team meeting, including what clients are raising and where opportunities sit. That data goes to support staff too, since they field most client calls between meetings and are often first to hear when something changes.
Applied at Anthony Petsis & Associates, our framework gives firms a roadmap for generating and measuring AI ROI. Adoption determines how much time your advisors save, efficiency determines how much capacity that creates, and effectiveness shows whether that capacity turns into assets, conversions, and better service.
Firms that want a measurable return on AI spend should focus on tools that are easy to adopt, reduce the administrative work advisors carry, and support advisors in putting that time toward its highest use: building and deepening client relationships.
Firms that are strategic with their AI use measure all three pillars, which helps them link AI spend to scalable growth instead of estimating it. Downstream, they can see which workflows are paying off and plan hiring around the capacity AI creates.