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The Citywire study group piece on RIA AI adoption is worth reading. The finding is not the taxonomy — large versus small, enterprise versus independent. The finding is what every participant describes as their implementation challenge: AI surfaces every unresolved internal question about data ownership and decision authority.
That challenge is consistent across firm sizes. Larger firms have more systems to reconcile, but the same missing accountability. Smaller firms have fewer dependencies, but the same ambiguity about what counts as a correct answer when an automated process and a manual record disagree.
The firms that have moved from pilot to production share one thing. They made a decision internally about who owns data accuracy before they selected any tool. That decision is organizational. No vendor makes it for the firm. The study group format matters because it is one of the few places that conversation actually happens out loud.
I predict we will look back at 2025 and 2026 as the years the conversation shifted from “which AI tools do we adopt?” to “what internal decisions do we need to make before any AI tool actually works?” The second question is harder and more useful.