Look no further than this week’s news that chipmaker Nvidia surpassed a $4 trillion market cap (the first time any company has ever done so) to note the overall accelerating growth in and importance of AI technology across industries and in economic significance.
To put this figure in perspective, it is just a bit less than the projected GDP of the entire United Kingdom or France, respectively.
For now, Nvidia controls more than 80% of the market for the chipsets needed to build, test and run AI platforms.
It has only been eight months since Nvidia made the news for briefly exceeding Apple’s market cap, having been valued at $3.43 trillion at the close of the market on a day in November.
Things continue to move so fast when it comes to AI that it is hard for me to believe I wrote a column discussing the “crescendo of hype” accompanying the technology back in 2019.
A lot of the AI coverage I wrote then was around machine learning, natural language processing and some of the companies that were being bought and brought into the financial services industry and at times touching wealth management.
As Tim Estes, founder and co-CEO of ML-NLP pioneer Digital Reasoning, said in 2020 at the time of its acquisition by Smarsh: “If you are a software company you have to be an AI company.” Even then, the distinctions between the two were rapidly fading away among technology firms of any size.
In our recently published 2025 WealthStack Study, we found that 68% of respondents, all financial advisors, are currently using or plan to adopt AI-powered tools. As I discussed in a recent column, this goes beyond freely available generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
We found that almost 30% of advisors surveyed were using standalone AI-based communications generation and management tools, more than 25% were using AI assistants for investment research and portfolio analysis, and more than 20% were using AI-powered chatbot platforms for client support and engagement.
I wrote about a separate survey from platform provider Orion earlier this year. Findings from that study indicated that 43% of advisory firms planned to increase their investment in AI-powered tools in 2025. AI was the only category out of nine tracked in the survey where firms expected to increase their spending over 2024 levels.
It is fascinating for me to see advanced, sophisticated AI capabilities becoming ubiquitous enough that it is percolating down to all levels and sizes of financial services organizations.
Take, for example, news this week that the country’s fifth-largest credit union, BECU, acquired the generative AI capabilities and 13 team members from the fintech EarnUp. The latter is payment solutions provider serving seven of the 25 largest U.S. banks. Its investors have included Bain Capital Ventures, KeyBank and LendingTree.
With the new unit and technology, BECU will soon be rolling out AI to its employees and members and has what it calls AI Advisor on its roadmap.
The firm goes by BECU today but started life as Boeing Employees’ Credit Union in 1935 when 18 employees put in $0.50 each. During the depression, employees had to have their own tools, which was prohibitively expensive, and that was the union’s first loan: $2.50 to a fellow employee for the purchase of tools.
Here is how Nadim Homsany, who heads up AI strategy and innovation at BECU (and came over from EarnUp) described his vision in a Q&A on the credit union’s blog: “The cool thing about AI and large language models and the way we plan to use them is that you’re democratizing financial access. People who couldn’t afford financial help now have access to it. There’s that old saying: ‘It’s expensive to be poor.’ If we can find a way to make that access hyper personalized, which is what we’re building for BECU members, then that changes the game for people.”
For me, this is another sign of hope that if the financial advisor industry cannot trickle down its own technology to help the mass affluent—which is how I long ago envisioned the evolution proceeding—then perhaps those directly supporting the mass affluent will have access to the tools to build it themselves.
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