Prospects no longer start with Google. They start with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and the answers they get shape who they ever consider hiring. For advisors and firms of every size, this is a quiet but fundamental shift in how new clients find you, vet you, and decide whether you make the short list.

This session unpacks what’s actually changing, why traditional SEO and website tactics fall short, and what advisors and marketing leaders need to do now to show up in AI-generated answers. We’ll cover how AI engines decide who to cite, what your digital footprint needs to look like, and the specific steps independent advisors and enterprise marketing teams can take to stay visible as the front door to advice quietly changes.

This study examines how wealth management firms are adopting AI and advanced technologies to streamline core workflows. It also reveals the measurable impact of automation on business performance and the competitive edge firms can achieve.

Brent is the founder and CEO of Savant and works in the Rockford, IL headquarters. 

Brent is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, and a Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA®). He has been involved in the financial services industry since 1988 and previously taught investment and finance courses at Rock Valley College, Rockford University, and Northern Illinois University.

Brent is a co-founder and past president of Zero Alpha Group (ZAG), an industry association. He is also a co-founder of the Alliance for RIAs (aRIA), a prestigious industry group. Brent was a long-term participant in Vistage (previously known as TEC) and The Strategic Coach™. He is currently a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and serves on the boards of the NIU Foundation and the RVC Foundation.

Brent was named by Chicago magazine as the #1 independent financial advisor for the Chicagoland area in 2008 and one of the nation’s top professional advisors by J.K. Lasser. In 2017 he was ranked by Forbes as #40 on their top 250 wealth advisors list. From 1997 until the survey ended in 2008, Brent appeared on Robb Report Worth magazine’s “The Nation’s 100 Most Exclusive Wealth Advisors” list. In 2011, Brent was named the nation’s 10 the “Most Experienced Independent Financial Advisor” by Bloomberg Businessweek. Brent was named “one of the 17 people advisors should watch in 2017” by Financial Planning magazine. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events and is recurrently featured in local, industry, and national media. Brent was named to Barron’s Advisor Hall of Fame in 2019, an award presented to one percent of all advisors in the industry, and has appeared in at least 10 of Barron’s annual Top 100 Advisor rankings. Under Brent’s leadership, Savant was named to the Inc. 5000 annual list of fastest-growing private companies in America in 2023. In 2024, Brent was named to the Chicago Titan 100, which recognizes the Chicago area’s most accomplished business leaders, and was named CEO of the Year by WealthManagement.com for individual RIA firms with $20+ billion in assets under management.

Phil Gale is COO and Co-Founder of VastAdvisor, the AI-native growth infrastructure platform for RIAs and enterprise wealth firms. Phil brings a career built at the intersection of advertising technology and programmatic sales — experience that now shapes VastAdvisor’s Campaign IQ engine and its approach to data-driven client acquisition.

Prior to VastAdvisor, Phil served as Senior Director, Advertising at Phunware, where he reported to Ian Karnell and helped take the company public on NASDAQ — giving VastAdvisor’s leadership team direct, first-hand experience navigating a public-markets outcome. Earlier in his career, Phil held senior advertising and partnerships roles including Head of Sales, Brand Advertising Europe and Head of Agency Development EMEA at InMobi, and Partnerships Director, Programmatic at Publicis Media.

At VastAdvisor, Phil leads operations and go-to-market execution, applying his programmatic and paid-media expertise to how the platform builds, measures, and optimizes advisor growth campaigns across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn.

Janise Brooks is President of PAX Financial Group, a fee-only RIA based in San Antonio, Texas managing over $950M in assets for more than 1,300 client households. With 18+ years at PAX and a background in operations rather than traditional advisory work, Janise brings a systems-thinking lens to firm leadership.

As President, Janise oversees the operational and strategic direction of a firm built around fiduciary, fee-only advice. Her approach to leadership is shaped by an interest in organizational behavior. She focuses on designing systems and culture that account for how people actually work, rather than how they’re expected to work on paper.

Over the past 2 years, that lens has extended to how PAX approaches AI. Janise oversees the firm’s AI infrastructure, and has built a President’s Assistant orchestrator and specialized agents supporting investment analysis, compensation strategy, marketing compliance, and business analytics. She led the firm’s AI governance work, vendor risk analysis, and a formal AI use policy, done in partnership with her CCO. She also designed, built, and delivered a firm-wide AI certification course to develop hands-on fluency among staff.

Janise is cautious about hype and more interested in what actually holds up in day-to-day practice. She brings a builder’s perspective, not a vendor’s or a consultant’s, to conversations about AI adoption in financial services: what’s realistic, what’s overstated, and what it actually takes to implement responsibly inside a firm managing client trust and fiduciary obligations. She has spoken on these topics both within the financial industry and to audiences in other sectors navigating similar questions about AI adoption.

David Quisenberry is the founder and CEO of Highvault Consulting, an advisory firm that helps registered investment advisors implement AI across their organizations securely and at scale. He brings a rare combination of practitioner and security depth: as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at a $10B+ RIA, he led the firm-wide rollout of AI, navigating the people, process, and risk challenges of getting an entire firm to adopt new tools rather than resist them.

David’s expertise spans cloud security, software security, and incident response which are backed by credentials as a Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) and a GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH), two of the profession’s respected certifications in building secure software and responding to cyberattacks. That background gives him a clear-eyed view of both the opportunity and the risk AI brings to wealth management. He champions a process-driven model of adoption, one that meets firms where they are and advances them through measured “crawl, walk, run” phases because in his experience, steady, structured progress is what makes AI adoption stick.

Beyond his professional work, David is committed to his community. He served on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Dougy Center, the National Grief Center for Children & Families, and is a past president of the Portland chapter of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a global nonprofit dedicated to improving the security of software.