Build, Buy, or Partner: How Enterprise Wealth Management Firms Actually Decide on AI
Every wealth management firm investing in AI is making a bet on how to reach AI maturity. About half of wealth and asset managers surveyed in 2025 had allocated more than $11 million to GenAI over the past two years, and 75% expected to cross that threshold in the next two, according to EY-Parthenon. Despite that spending, MIT research shows only about 5 percent of enterprises are actually seeing a return on their AI investments.
That pitfall can be bridged by identifying a clear goal for AI and then deciding whether to build, buy, or partner to achieve it. Those decisions tend to matter much more than how much gets spent. I joined Liam Hanlon, VP of Strategy & Head of Insights at Jump, to talk through how we answer the build, buy, or partner question at Equitable Advisors.
Key takeaways
- Define your goal before you evaluate vendors. We followed this framework: determine what you want to achieve, what's missing, then how to acquire it. Starting with vendors buys features instead of results.
- AI spending and AI ROI move independently. Firms seeing a return on their AI investments decide to build, buy, or partner separately for each capability, not as one blanket choice for the whole firm.
- Narrow your vendor list. Match each capability to a specific need and partner, and let those partners build new capabilities instead of evaluating every new AI release yourself.
Purpose over hype
The difference between firms that succeed with AI and the ones that don't comes down to how systematically they approach the build, buy, or partner decision, not their budget or timing. The build, buy, or partner framework we followed with Jump follows the same logic: define what you want to achieve with AI, identify what's missing to get there, and only then decide how to acquire it.
- Build when the problem is exclusive to your firm and nobody else solves it.
- Buy when the problem is common across the industry and you need parity fast.
- Partner when the problem is common but the solution needs to be custom. This allows you to influence the product roadmap and ensure it meets evolving compliance standards without owning it outright.
Many firms are landing on buy or partner. According to Menlo Ventures, purchased AI now accounts for 76 percent of enterprise deployments versus 24 percent built in-house, and MIT found internally built deployments succeed about a third of the time—roughly half the rate of purchased ones. That math is what drives digital-first firms toward partnership models.
My AI adoption advice for wealth management firms
The firms winning right now aren't necessarily the ones that know the most about AI, since the field moves too fast for anyone to keep up with all of it. What separates them is restraint in what they chase. That discipline helps firms actually scale with AI instead of spreading themselves across every new advancement.
To prioritize, determine what your advisors actually need. Allow great partners like Jump to spend all day, every day, thinking about the next great thing to create. And then decide, together, how to leverage the latest tech to make a measurable business impact.
You have to treat the build-buy-partner decision as zero-sum: every dollar and hour spent on a capability you don't need is a dollar and hour not spent on what actually differentiates your firm.
Why spend millions on something you could spend thousands on, only to divert your energy away from what actually creates a competitive advantage for your firm?
Watch the full conversation on demand: Build, Buy & Partner: How Enterprises are Deploying AI with Liam Hanlon and Anthony Montufar
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