Handled right, AI can be an effective tool in the indie- RIA’s fight for wallet share.

Trends in the robo market suggest that human-AI hybridization is a likely outcome of market forces now in play. Getting AI calls for staff training, system oversight, and a keen sense that, used prudently, AI may help repair dented consumer confidence.

It’s tempting to paint independent RIA owners as virtuous rebels — beleaguered like the members of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, fighting the good fight against an evil Empire (read “wirehouses”) that’s parsecs ahead of the upstarts in equipment.

But the Star Wars analogy doesn’t really hold up.

First, and as an objective fact, the Empire had cooler uniforms than the rebels. In real life, I don’t think Wall Street sartorial splendor has that much on Main Street style.

That’s no moon

But that one also falls flat as a comparison to the fight for wallet share between RIAs and national outfits. It’s been a decade at least since big brokerages operated at a clear-cut tech advantage over their smaller rivals. That’s because a host of tech vendors have targeted independent RIAs with the expressed intention of equipping them to tackle big-name firms, and RIAs have taken them up on it.

You might even argue indies have a tech advantage — making them a nimble squadron of steely-eyed X-Wing fighters looking to exploit their enemies’ vulnerabilities, as it were. After all, instead of getting saddled with costly, less-flexible and rapidly aging in-house platforms that wirehouses have to contend with, they can hire and fire outsourcers at will to get the newest tech at the best prices available.

But which wealth-management model will prevail in the newfangled fight for AI superiority? Here it might be good to abandon Star Wars parallels altogether, because AI — artificial intelligence — raises serious issues for businesses of almost every kind.

And scene

AI may be the biggest business disruptor in view, with potential to trigger more change than the internet has wrought in recent decades. Why? Because AI enables the completion of a variety of data-analysis tasks quicker than a human can compute. This means many human jobs will change — in some cases, out of recognition — while others will disappear entirely.

As a matter of strategic planning, you want to try to be on the “change” rather than the “disappear” side of that ledger.