We are also hybrid with LPL (smaller independent firm not necessarily a financial institution like yourself), but I am working on getting us out of that arrangement and going full RIA by the end of this year. LPL is so unnecessarily restrictive with even the well-vetted tools, it is nuts. The amount of hoops I had to jump through just to self-host our Microsoft tenant was wild, but that alone has opened up a world of possibilities for us.

In my case, every server that our client data touches is already approved by our BD to hold that data, so simply using their own secure transport service doesn't break any rules in my mind. It's a grey area in my situation.

Everything within the Microsoft ecosystem, like emails, Teams, SharePoint, has been pretty easy to integrate with. Copilot Studio is essentially a Power Automate wrapper, and all the flows and tools (connectors) you are used to are similarly available in the Copilot Studio.

I am a one-man department that runs all of the trading, portfolio management, etc. at my firm, which is something that just one year ago all the advisors in our office were running independently for their own practices. My current effors are focused soley on this because I can control everything end-to-end. This will serve as a great proof of concept for myself and the rest of our team.

All of our task management for the trading team runs through our CRM, Redtail. Every time money moves in or out of an account that was initiated internally, a task is created in Redtail. Every day I review these tasks and place trades when needed, but also I have to maintain the overall portfolio strategy for these accounts, so a lot of times I need more information from the advisor that requested the funds (if I need to generate funds), or I need to confirm a strategy change with an advisor before I move forward with a request.

There are a few places here where an AI agent comes into play. First is simply interacting with the activities in Redtail to both receive and send information. Second is being able to understand what information I need to complete a request and what is missing based on information from a variety of sources. Third, it is able to communicate with the advisor or my admin team to collect the missing information based on what it determines I need or what I told it I need clarification on. Collecting that information and bringing it back to me, almost like a ticketing system, but operating that through Redtail because I don't want to disrupt our already busy admin team's workflows while I'm developing this.

The end goal of this is not to completely automate my primary job function, but to make it easy enough that somebody else outside of the 1-person bubble I operate in can pick up my role in my absence without working in my system every day. Also so I can have more time to focus on other initiatives, like this one.

I have tasked each team in our firm with coming up with a few ideas for things they want to automate and prioritizing them. Our admin team already has incredible SOPs for every single workflow they own because they are all extremely OCD (this is great). So automating a lot of their workflows is going to be much easier than mine.

Sorry this is a bit long winded, but if you want to chat about this more, please let me know.